


Rock on the Scorching Sand

by MiggyBird



Category: Rockman | Mega Man Classic
Genre: Action, Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Western, Angst, Blades, Character Tags To Be Added - Freeform, Drama, Gen, Golems, Gun Violence, Guns, Gunshot Wounds, Major Character Injury, Minor Character Death, Science Fiction, Tragedy, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:33:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 30,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21731512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiggyBird/pseuds/MiggyBird
Summary: War - when boys fight and die for the whims of old men. Young bodies are strewn across the desert. To end it forever, a physician and an engineer create uncanny men with a mysterious System. When it all goes wrong, the weakest among them, a boyish corpus called Rock, must summon the strength to follow his orders. To fight for the whims of the old men who made him.
Kudos: 18





	1. Metal on Metal

There was no wind, and he was without breath. The air was perfectly quiet. The only sound came from the factory. The tall, square building, surrounded by piles of cut steel bar and crates of smaller hardware, emitted a constant drone and clangor, and the occasional shriek of metal on metal.

All around was sand, the town sitting a long walk away now, with no road leading here. The sun was climbing still, but it wouldn't matter once he was inside.

There were bodies around, far away. There were a lot of them, he’d been told. Out in the fields where the fighting had been done, long before he’d opened his eyes. And there was hardly anyone left to see those bodies home. So everywhere he traveled, he saw shapes on the horizon that made him think of death.

Rock, for that was his name, had done some fighting too in his short life. He’d been taught to shoot. He’d been showed his own strength. And the handful of men he’d now been sent to kill, he’d challenged these foes before. He’d struggled blindly against them when they were a mob, during the first moments of all this mayhem in the doctor’s workshop. But it was here the first real battle would take place. The first of many clashes between him and a single, ready foe.

He touched the gun at his side, barely feeling the weapon on his fingers – no more than his unnatural body felt anything. His eyes scanned the front of the factory, the shapes behind the windows, and settled on the small, man-sized entrance which stood next to the bay door. Both were closed. He walked to the former, and wrapped his fingers around the handle. The wind picked up for just a second, enough to shift the dust and metal filings at his feet. Then he flung the door open and entered the cacophony.

He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to do this.

But he had work to do.

The enslaved paused in their toil to look at him as he passed. He nearly reached out to one, to put his hand on a young boy's shoulder, but he kept his gait steady and forward. It felt wrong to touch them. He wasn’t one of them. So he hid his face from them instead, behind the folds of a dirty yellow scarf - a memento that Rock had worn since it had been found, though a memento of what, he still hadn’t been told. The air was hot, though. He lifted his hat, navy blue with a stiff, low crown, and let his forward motion push the air through and steal the heat hanging over his head. Heat was the only thing he felt in full. Supposedly that was just the way it was for people like him, if they could be called people. His kind. His kin.

There was a sudden, loud groan from above. He looked up, and saw something massive coming toward him. He leapt to the side, just in time to pull himself away from the spot where a massive iron cog hit the floor, a buckshot-like blast of concrete exploding in every direction from the point of impact. There were cries from the workers as the cog rolled away and toward the assembly lines, tipping and crashing to the floor as it slowed.

He turned his eyes back up to where it had rolled from. A familiar man stood above, a figure from Rock’s worst memories, and the one he'd come to destroy. They didn’t have names like people did, but he knew what this one was called. The factory’s master, the one who’d cut steel for the doctors before, and brandished it during the coup. The Metal-Man.

The enemy's wild eyes seemed to blaze red even in the dark of the factory. The rest of his face was covered by a dust mask, and his body clothed in red and black. Rock was the forgiving sort, but this was a madman with murder in his eyes. And they had orders, both of them. The fight was coming.

Then the masked man dashed away, toward the back of the factory. Rock immediately gave chase from below the walkway, hauling himself up a ladder and following the glimpses he caught of his fleeing foe. Lights flashed, warnings beeped, and machinery swung wild at him. He ran, his hand always ready to draw and fire, and found himself ducking and darting constantly as lifts collapsed around him, drills snapped their bits into shrapnel, saws leapt from destroyed anchors, and cut wires flew past his face. His quarry was sabotaging everything in his path, tearing the factory apart, he realized. And he was right to do it. After all, if the factory's master died here, the workers would be free to leave, and there would be no one to direct the manufacturing, so as long as the master won the fight, it wouldn't matter what was left standing. Now that the battle was here, all that mattered was survival.

Sprinting through a warehouse now, with mercifully few threats to fall toward him, he saw his foe make a run for an open bay door at the side. He drew his gun, a heavy revolver-like weapon whose shots left streaks of yellow in the air, and with only a slight pause to aim, fired at the door. The chain hooked to the wall to hold the door in place was shattered near the anchor point, and the door came down hard, thundering as it hit the floor. The masked man halted, shocked, but did not turn. Instead he swung his arm down violently, and the compact apparatus strapped to it slid out and locked in place, beginning to whirr and whine. A circular saw, less than a foot in diameter, came to life at the front of the extension rigged to his arm. Then, with his other hand, he started to heave at the chain, the heavy door crawling back upward.

The factory's master had nearly opened it enough to duck through, when he glanced back at his pursuer. His wild eyes went wide, and he spun around to swing the saw, forcing the man in blue to sway and break his charge. The door came down loudly again as the battle began, in a furious blizzard of swipes with the running saw. The master's eyes were intense and unblinking, his breath forced out by the power of his swings, muffled by the mask but coming in huffs and growls as he lashed his arm in crisscrossing arcs. Rock wheeled back and bent away from the attacks, not frantic but very careful.

He'd brought a gun to a knife fight; he should have had an advantage. But his weapon was a unique one. It was powerful, each shot ferociously so. But it only held three. And one was spent. And so long as he was on the defensive, reloading was not an option. So he evaded one slash of the saw after another, looking for an opening to deflect it, to grab the swinging arm, anything he could do to break up the assault. Finally, he knocked it away, took aim, and destroyed it with one more well-placed shot, the frame exploding into two crooked arms, the warped blade spinning itself out on one of them. The Metal-Man ripped it off his arm, and tossed it to the floor.

_Kachack. Whirr._

Rock watched a second saw extension come to life on his foe's other arm, but the enemy didn't continue the fight. Instead, he bounded away, and in a few strides took cover behind a stack of heavy crates.

“So. The man in blue,” came the scratched and creaking voice. “Or do ya prefer 'Rock?' That's right, the doc told me all about you, Rock.” The gunman heard the location of the voice subtly shifting behind the crates, though the obstruction made it impossible to track reliably. He debated lowering his weapon to reload it, but for the time being he kept it trained where he could aim at either edge of the stack in a hurry. “Where'd you get a name like that? That where Tom found yer body? He dig ya out from unner a rock, Rock?”

“I don’t know. We’re not all as simple as you are, 'Metal-Man,'” Rock responded, hoping for a lull. “Maybe they know something about me I don’t.” Talk; talk was good. Talk gave him a moment. He reached for a cartridge, to reload and recharge his weapon. But then he heard a shuffling, and pointed it closer to that side of the stack, waiting. “... But what I do know, is no matter how nicely I ask, I can’t trust you not to hold these people prisoner anymore. I know you’re going to work them to death. You were told to. Weren’t you?”

“Yeah, thereabouts,” the Metal-Man answered wryly.

“This last bullet’s for you then. I’m sorry, but that’s how it has to be. I want you to know, I’m just doing what I was told, too.” For a second, there was a quaver in his voice that he could neither explain nor suppress. But he kept his gun high. Ready.

There was a long pause, with only the whirring of the saw and the distant noise of the factory to fill it. Then, the Metal-Man spoke. “... 'Last bullet?'” Rock cursed himself for being so arrogant as to let that slip. Not that it mattered. Gun; knife-fight. The moment the factory's master stepped out, he'd be dead. He wasn’t that fast. At that moment, a streak of crimson flashed out from the stack on his right side. Rock turned, and with the kind of precision only unthinking sinew and instinct can provide, fired and hit his mark. The red jerry can was punctured, and fell to the floor in a series of plastic clunks. Rock cursed inside himself again. The scratched voice came. “So. That was yer last bullet?”

Rock tried to answer with something confident, something that would dissuade his enemy from taking advantage. But he said nothing, and that was all the response the Metal-Man needed. Leaping over the left side, he reappeared and swiped with the running blade, and suddenly the man in blue was the one on the run. No more shots. No chance to reload. He sprinted, trying to widen the gap, but with nothing to fear his foe was now doing everything in his power to pursue, and kill. The door was still too heavy to open quickly. The factory was disassembling itself in the direction he'd come. There was no safe way out. He heard the sound of the saw come frighteningly close to his right side, and dove into a roll, hearing it buzz past his ear like an angry insect.

“Whatsa matter, Rock? I heard the 'man in blue' was a threat, heard he was lookin' fer us, lookin’ ta tear us up! This all ya got, man in blue? _This all ya got?!_ ”

A glint on the floor drew Rock’s attention, attached to an odd but familiar shape. He dashed toward it, holstering his weapon, then stooped out of his run and snatched from the floor the broken saw he'd shot from the Metal-Man's arm. The blade was warped, but sharp as ever. He turned, and in an instant that seemed to last for minutes, he met the master's blazing eyes, saw the running weapon on his left arm, and dove straight past its reach as he plunged the limp blade into his opponent's throat.

The two stepped back, the Metal-Man clutching the ragged wound with his free hand. Rock knew he felt no great pain from such a wound, but the dark, inhuman blood still came, and the groan from the Metal-Man's throat was transformed into a gurgle on its way out. The broken weapon in Rock’s hand had tasted first blood. Their eyes met again, and the man in blue shook his head slowly. “I’m sorry. This isn’t how I wanted to do this.”

The Metal-Man charged, swinging, screaming through his own blood. Rock lifted the broken saw rig and deflected the incoming blade, then grabbed the offending arm, clutched the master’s sleeve, and struggled to hold it away from him while the saw whirred hungrily at the end of the frame. He threw the broken weapon forward again, into the stomach of his confused foe, and released it there, where it stayed. The Metal-Man stumbled backward, shocked, trying to decide between holding his neck closed and pulling out the weapon. Rock took that moment to draw and reload his gun, watching the tiny chamber window turn to a spot of blazing yellow as the weapon was armed. Then he lifted it, centered the sights between the fretful eyes of the Metal-Man, and squeezed the trigger. In a yellow flash, the fight was over.

Rock sighed, his shoulders heaving forward and downward as his whole body sloughed off the tension of battle. It was done. It was over, and he hadn't been scratched. Shaken up for sure, but unharmed. He could only hope the rest would be ended this easily. He thought about returning home, or the closest thing he had to a home. But he was undamaged, and had plenty of ammunition. He could keep going, he decided. The longer he took to end all of this, the more people would suffer. The doctor would want him to keep going.

The people in the factory, he realized, didn't know their master, their captor, was dead. Rock moved toward the heavy door, deciding to loop around to the front again rather than traverse the treacherous ruins of the factory. He'd placed his hand on the remains of the shattered chain and was about to haul the door upward, when he noticed an unpleasant sound his mind had been tuning out. He turned, and looked at the shredded body on the floor. On its right arm, still running, still scraping the floor, was the saw. Slowly Rock approached, crouched down, and inspected the weapon. He found the kill switch, and took a moment to figure out the rest of its mechanics, retracting it and removing it from its owner's dead limb. Rock stood, and with his empty gun hand he attached the stilled weapon to the opposite forearm.

“Long road ahead,” he said to himself, pacing back to the door and hauling it up. He locked the chain in place, and left the warehouse, squinting against the sun. “Wouldn't hurt to get equipped.”

<<<

It’s midday, and it’s hot out in the desert. The wind helps a little. But with the cool comes sand and stink from the dry wastes war has made of this old man’s world.

A physician named Thomas is sitting in the dust, miles from home, or the closest thing he has to a home. He’s a little too old to walk so far comfortably, his whiskers a cascade of white and silver. But his friend is busy fixing the truck - Albert is reliably handy, to distantly understate it - and Thomas needs to escape the workshop from time to time. Escape the view from his windows, the look of the town with its craters and scorched earth and empty buildings, the ghostly sounds made by the few living who remain, and the haunting shapes of the unclaimed dead on the horizon.

Thomas sits on something metal that no longer holds a definite shape as it might have when it was manufactured. Now, it’s only part of the rubble. In the palm of one hand, he balances a book, whose cover is emblazoned with marks that are unknown to him. They bring about in him a feeling he hasn’t known since he was a child; the feeling of looking at something he does not understand, and wondering at implications beyond imagination. The markings are chillingly alien, but the writing inside is in a language he can read. The book speaks of things he knows, and things he doesn’t know. Simple science and shocking diablerie. Proven theory and wild ideas. Reason and lunacy.

All things that will come to define his final days.

Thomas reads it through, over and over again, shaking dust and sand from the pages and the nooks of the bindings as his hands tremble at a realization.

"It could work.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Note: All right, smiles everybody, here we go. I'm going to use this space minimally but for now, let me just say that whether you just found this story or you're back for more (you loony gal or fella), thank you for reading. As my first foray into fanfiction and something I spent years putting together in my head, this one means a lot to me, and I hope it makes you feel something. Because I sure didn't pull a stunt like this just to get no reaction. See you in Chapter 2!


	2. Last Train Home

Rock paced steadily at the front of the crowd, not speaking. At his back, the freed walked the desert with him, murmuring amongst themselves. Rock looked over his shoulder, and they halted, the nearest to him freezing in place with the others slowing or colliding behind them. He stopped as well, turning. At first, Rock frowned, unsure why they’d react that way. Under his judgemental gaze, the people shrank back, and then he understood.

In time they reached the railway, and he could see tracks leading over the horizon to the town’s humble skyline. Rock knew it was time he left them, and so he raised his hand and began to speak. “Listen up,” he called. Children clung to old and crippled adults. Children. The crowd of slaves, what remained of the town, was made of those who had been too young or too old to fight. Too weak to die with their boots on. But not too weak to work. Their palms and fingers were scabbed, their faces still dirty. He wondered if maybe the entire town was here. He hadn’t seen another living person, besides the doctors. Though he recognized them as such, from the dark of his mind where a trace of humanity remained to string up his thoughts. 

A middle-aged woman tightened her lips and stepped forward to face him, looking as though she meant to protect them all from him. As if she’d need to. As if she could. “What is it?” she asked.

Rock pointed behind him. “Follow these tracks. The trains are still running. When one comes, you’ll have to make yourselves noticed. Make it slow down.”

The woman paused. “You ain’t takin’ us?”

He shook his head. “No. I have a different train to catch.” He removed his hat again, and tried to ignore the curious stares he welcomed by giving them a better look at his face. The sun hit the top of his head. It was hot. Past midday now, but it wasn’t cooling off. The people looked haggard. “Listen. Follow the tracks toward town on foot until you see a train. You all should get home as soon as you can. It won’t do you any good to stay out here.”

She looked back at the crowd. Then to Rock. “Then… we’re free to go?”

“Of course,” he said earnestly, placing the navy blue back on his head, pressing it down a little.

“Who are you?” she asked. “Who the hell are you? Who… Who’s to blame for all this?” Perhaps emboldened by being assured of her freedom, she started to push hard for answers she’d likely been wanting for a long time.

Rock considered the questions. And he considered the commands he’d been given, regarding exactly what he faced now. Being outside in the world, being asked about himself, about the doctors and what they’d done. Even long before he ever set foot outside, the command had always been clear, adamant, and emphatic: say nothing.

“You oughta get going. Long walk back to town,” Rock told the woman, and turned his back on her.

“Don’t you-!” She started to chastise him, but she stopped to watch something in the distance. When he noticed her looking, Rock followed suit. He hadn’t heard or felt it, his body didn’t have such fine senses. But peering down the line, he made out the smoke of a train engine.

There were sounds of relief from the crowd, but Rock squinted into the distance, searching for something he knew was out there waiting for him to find it. The train was coming fast. Urgently. The people of the desert were still mostly unaware of Albert’s men and their actions; it’d been a quiet sort of coup, that no one outside of town really knew of just yet. The trains were running on time.

The engine was coming in fast, and behind it were cars filled with something unseen. Passenger cars, repurposed and packed, covered with boards and tarp. This train wasn’t going to stop in town, at least not of its own accord. It had another destination, Rock knew.

“Go! Get behind the dunes!” He shouted at the crowd, startling them. They hesitated, and he raised his voice until his throat rattled. “Get away! Hide!” He pushed them down the hill they’d been climbing, the slowest of them slipping in the sand. “They don’t know you’re free! Don’t let ‘em see you!”

When they finally understood, they all lined themselves up out of sight at the bottom of the hill, where the tracks were far out of their sight again. The woman was quite a few bodies away, but she took it upon herself to call to him. “Is it another one of you, drivin’ that train? The engineer?”

Rock didn’t like the way she said it. Thomas wouldn’t have said it that way. He would have said one of  _ them.  _ But he nodded gravely, and gestured for her to keep low. “I’m getting on that train. All of you, you’re getting the next one. The next one oughta be safe, I think.”

The sound was getting louder. The woman asked something else, but he didn’t catch it. Soon all talk was drowned out by the roar and rattle of wheels on rails. He waited until the engine had passed him, along with a few cars. Then in a second he was on his feet, charging up the dune. His boots threw sand up behind him, he put his weight forward and sprinted, and in a moment he was by the tracks.

The train was going fast, all right. It would be a stretch to say he’d imagined this moment; “imagining” things was a little beyond him, unfortunately. Something about what made him work, that System, didn’t really allow for it. But he’d been thinking about it, in what ways he could.  _ I’ll grab the train and climb up. I’ll find an open car, and jump. I’ll run with it, and catch it. _

But it was so fast, and the ground was so soft and uneven, he didn’t figure he’d be able to run fast enough to make a difference. And there were no open cars to jump into. That left one option. Rock got as close as he dared, and readied himself for his next move. He didn’t have long, another ten, maybe twenty seconds of cars passing by. They were all built pretty much the same, which was good; it gave him time to study them. They all had handrails in the same place. Rock’s fingers curled and uncurled in anticipation, until he finally worked up the nerve to grab hold.

The train snatched him away, and there was a pulling in his shoulder so intense it was actually painful. That was a bad sign, that he felt pain from so mundane a thing. His body slammed into the handrail, and he grabbed it with his other hand to keep himself from dragging. It knocked the breath out of him, but breath was no good to something like him anyway, so he just hefted himself up and over, and onto the car.

<<<

Thomas is holding back what he knows. Not because he doesn’t trust Albert; he does. He’s more than willing to share the burden of his mind. But he can hardly believe what he’s about to suggest. He’s still waiting to wake up.

Albert - whose whiskers are all as white as Tom’s but trimmed back as one does when nuts and bolts and spinning wheels are one’s trade - is slumped backward with his arm over his chair, rubbing the edges of his moustache as he waits for his friend to say something. He’d asked about the book when Tom had returned with it, who responded very hesitantly with, “In a minute.” Thomas had made tea then, leaving the book on a table. Albert had reached to open it, but despite his curiosity his hand had stopped when the thing came into focus. 

He’s waiting, watching the back of Thomas’ head, occupying himself with his mug of tea. He prefers coffee, but he’d sensed it was a bad time to go making requests.

Thomas stares out the window, and for once he lays his eyes deliberately and enduringly on the disquieting shapes on the ground far away. He considers them more carefully than he otherwise prefers to. “So many bodies,” he finally says, breaking the silence.

Albert’s lips crinkle with distaste. “Quit looking, Tom.” He drinks again while he waits for something more. “One day… one of these days, either the wind’ll bury them, or the river’ll suck ‘em all out to sea.”

“The river hasn’t been that high in… hell knows,” he sighs. Thomas turns his head enough to spy the book. Albert leans over, raises his eyebrows expectantly, tries to elicit an actual conversation. But Tom is still trying to justify his own thoughts. He stares at the bodies again. Far from the borders of town, the leaves of many a family tree cover the ground like history’s bleakest autumn. Thomas clenches his fingers around the handle of his mug, and he looks down at his hand - old and cracked, spotted, his knuckles protesting the tight fist channeling his unrest.

“It’s idiotic,” Thomas continues. “All those young lives, lost-”

“Tom.”

“And it’s for us, for the privilege of old men like us to go on living out pointless lives a little longer,” he complains, more troubled every second.

“Tom,  _ please. _ ”

The note of sadness in Albert’s voice catches Thomas by his sympathies and reins in the tirade. Thomas turns around more fully now, and tries to meet Albert’s eyes. But his friend is looking away, agitated, running his fingers through his wispy hair.

Albert has lost a great deal. Everything but himself, one might say, but likely much of that too. A son. A wife. A grandson. A family home, that once held a great deal more love and warmth than this drafty workshop and its walls with more stains than paint to adorn them. So much has he lost to war. “I’m sorry,” Thomas says, who on the other hand has lost nearly nothing by comparison.

Albert flicks a pointed gaze at him without moving another muscle. He takes a sudden breath before he speaks. “You never had a family, did you Tom?”

Thomas, who in his age has felt a constant and yet oddly easy to ignore ache for that fact, shakes his head. “No. Never did.”

“Why? I mean… Why not, do you suppose?” He’s genuinely curious, no malice in his question.

Thomas is drinking, and wanders about with his mug to his lips for a few seconds. He thinks, eyeing the scraps and papers on the table, and the book. “Just always…” He ruminates on his answer. “Just always had other things I thought I should do.”

“Suppose it was worth it?” Now there’s a bit of malice. Thomas takes it. He’d opened up the talk of all this.

“No,” he wants to say. “Yes,” he wants to correct himself. “No,” for what he might have had. “Yes,” for what he spared himself losing.

“I don’t know,” he answers aloud. He puts down the mug, and drops his hand onto the book. Albert raises his eyebrows again, his eyes moving between it and Tom. “But I’d like to do something that’s worth it. I want to do something that’s worth all those younger men dying for my sake.”

He raps his fingers on the book’s cover, nodding his head in self-assurance. He’d like to do all that. Around him are parts, notes, metalworking tools, hardware, medical and surgical supplies; resources of their trades. And in the pages of that book are plans and explications, and words that make him sweat. The System.

>>>

Curious, Rock peeled back the tarp covering the window of the car. The windows were all open. Inside were crates arranged tightly on the floor, and then loose materials piled on top. Tools and metal bars, a burlap sack of stones; digging equipment, notably. Thomas had mentioned a mine.

It didn’t take much effort to climb to the top of the car, though Rock was aware of the nagging strain in his shoulder. Something was grinding against something else, out of place. He put it out of mind for the moment. He was here now, and not far at all from the one he meant to kill. Were they both on solid ground, they could have read each other’s faces. But as things were, Rock was a few cautious leaps away, and the engineer was holed up at the front, completely unaware, or so he hoped. He didn't know what this one was called. Thomas had told him of the Metal-Man, but not all of them had received names before Albert had left with them. Rock hoped he could see this through without learning what Albert called this one. Somehow, that felt easier.

At first, Rock jumped between cars without much worry for noise, letting the train cover his heavy footfalls. As he came closer to the engine, he jumped and caught his own weight more carefully. He didn’t want a struggle. He drew his weapon momentarily, and checked the chamber. Armed. He glanced at the saw. Testing it would make too much noise, but it was working fine in the warehouse. Rock holstered his gun, and jumped another car. He took his time walking to the front, for it was the last. Just a few feet in front of him now was the engine, chugging away with the engineer inside.

Rock had a plan within a minute or so. The window was wide open, and it would be easy for him to grab the roof and swing through. There was a chance he’d been seen or heard, either before or after boarding. But if he made just the right kind of entrance, he’d have the engineer off-guard. Jump in, keep moving, draw, fire. It was a small area, and Rock wouldn’t have much room to maneuver, but neither would his enemy. Most importantly, the Metal-Man hadn’t held a gun. And he’d had warning. This, he thought, should be simple.

Rock pressed his hat down again, and lowered himself, gauging the movement of the car and looking for the right moment to jump. The ride was smooth, and he decided there was no better time than the present. One step forward, and then a leap; Rock twisted himself around in the air and grabbed the roof of the engine’s cabin, throwing himself feet-first through the window. That was when his shoulder finally gave.

As his weight hit the lowest point of his swing, he felt that pulling in his shoulder turn to a tearing and popping. To his credit, the engineer was very surprised indeed when Rock came tumbling through behind him, filling up half of what little space was in the tiny, rattling room with his body. Rock struck the floor on his back and his good shoulder, and scrambled to rise to his feet. 

His gun was on his right hip beneath his injured arm, which now hung mostly limp with a sickening metallic grind accompanying every sway. He could move his wrist, and fingers, but couldn’t raise it, so he reached across his stomach to pull his gun with his left arm.

“Wh-who…?! It’s-s-s you! You’re the-!” The engineer, a wide-set man in orange coveralls, sputtered the closest thing to a greeting Rock was about to get. Then he charged forward, and slammed himself into the man in blue with all his considerable weight. Rock hit the wall and went down, slumped on his rear end. He leaned forward to get up, and reached for his gun again. The teeth of the saw on his left arm caught on his vest, and his fingers slipped off the grip of his holstered weapon. When Rock looked up again, he saw something that made him freeze with fear.

“You know wh-who I am?!” The engineer had the firebox open. Flames licked outward from the opened grate, which he leaned back from as he jammed a small stoking shovel inside. “I’m the Man in Charge! I’m the  _ master _ of this here train! And you… y-you ain’t my passenger!”

It was an awful twist of fate that some things worked the way they did. No one knew why, not even the doctors, but though his body didn’t feel things so finely as a man’s, and pain was something he hardly felt most of the time, heat was something different. Heat, and steam, and fire. Rock, and all those like him, they felt heat just as well as anyone. They could burn like men. Rock had known so ever since the day he’d scalded himself making the doctors’ tea. Ever since, though he feared very little, he’d feared to burn.

When the Man in Charge flung his blazing coals at Rock, the man in blue didn’t react so cooly as he’d done when faced with a saw in an open warehouse. He pressed himself against the wall, and held his hands clumsily in front of himself, losing his nerve to an instant of panic. He felt the engineer’s might behind the coals that struck him in the body and hands where he was protected by sturdy leather. But on his face and neck he felt the far more potent sting of fire on his skin. He cried out in pain and fright, shielding himself like a helpless boy. He hadn’t prepared for this. He hadn’t imagined it. He knew he had to fight back, but it was a struggle to regain his courage.

He opened his eyes long enough to look at the engineer, who had a nervous grin on his face for having seemed to come out on top in the opening exchange. Rock’s eyes anxiously darted around, searching. He had the gun. He had the blade. And…

“That’s-s-sright! That’s right, that’s why they call me the Man in- D-damn it!” the engineer’s halfhearted blustering stopped as he lost his grip on the shovel going for another pile of hot coals. The Man in Charge turned his attention away from Rock, jiggling the shovel and jerking his face away from the fires that jumped out at him. When he turned back, what little confidence he’d mustered drained away in a second. Rock was upon him.

Rock ran forward clutching a coal in his hand, the heat passing quickly through the leather. Before the engineer’s hands could leave the shovel and defend him, Rock smashed it dead-center into his face. The Man in Charge screamed, a surprisingly shrill noise, and collapsed backwards. Rock raised the coal again, holding it as long as he dared with the warmth in his palm turning to an unnerving heat.

“N-no! No, no!” the Man in Charge cried.

Rock brought it down against his face, and then again, and again. It shattered on the second strike, the third he delivered with a handful of fragments. Rock turned to his knuckles instead, the blows tearing the stitches of his glove. The cries became discomforting, injured murmurs. Instinctively, he went for his gun with his right hand to finish it. When his arm wouldn’t obey, he reached across again, the saw catching briefly but allowing him to draw. He planted the barrel against what remained of the engineer’s forehead, and fired.

The cabin was quiet. Not really, it was a noisy machine he was riding in, but it seemed quiet now. Rock leaned and caught himself against the wall, with his closed fist that still held the gun, hovering over the engineer for a moment to look down over his work. He pushed, and sent himself back, dropping to the floor on the other side of the cabin. There, he rested.

Rock sluggishly holstered his weapon. He kept his eyes off the engineer for a while, but eventually morbid curiosity drew them back to get another look. He turned his head away, and spoke to the wall. “I’m sorry,” he sighed heavily.

He’d get up in a moment, to sort out the controls and find a way to see that the train stopped in town. He could ride it back there and rejoin the doctor. He needed to rest. It wouldn’t do much to heal anything; not much of that happened in a body like his. But he needed rest all the same, because there was a feeling somewhere deep down inside that body which troubled him.

It wasn’t the torn-up shoulder, or the pain around his face that he touched gingerly with his fingers. It was much deeper than those. Somewhere in the pit of his gut, there was a disturbing feeling that he’d had to wrestle down after fighting the Metal-Man, and that he was forced to grapple with now as well.

He  _ was _ sorry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Note: If you think this one is brutal, brace yourself. Life only gets harder for the man in blue. See you in 3.


	3. What Has to be Done

“On its skin, it’s madness,” Thomas admits.

“No, Tom. No it’s not. It’s madness all the way down,” Albert insists.

Thomas looks across the table at him, moving through a clump of pages with his thumb. “You don’t want to do it.”

“Keep talking, and we’ll see.” Albert leans back in his chair and laces his fingers together, waggling his eyebrows coaxingly.

Thomas thumbs through the pages again like a flipbook. He looks down at the contents briefly, but he’s read it enough and doesn’t need to refresh his knowledge now. He shuts the book and lays his arm over it as he goes on. “There are a lot of bodies. Not a lot of families to collect them. Hell, some of those families are out there too.” Albert’s expression grows a bit darker, and he moves on quickly. “With this… System. With that, and some metal… and…”

“And some very ill-advised practice of medicine.”

Rubbing his chin, swallowing Albert’s remark, Thomas continues. “You understand what I’m suggesting? The end, not just the means. We could make something new,” he answers himself. “Something better, somehow, I’m sure. Something…” He licks his lips, staring into a dry mug at the edge of the table. “Something not… not so weak as humanity. Something that could stand and fight, for the sake of the young and old… keep fighting until all the fighting is done… Maybe done forever.” Albert is looking away now, massaging his head with his fingers, one of the tufts of white hair waving up and down. Tom isn’t sure if his friend is disengaging or just thinking. “What’s in this book, this System, Albert. It could make those bodies walk and run again, and fight, if it worked. It could make new people. Better ones. Stronger people."

Albert shakes his head, his hair twisting in the breeze. He starts chuckling to himself. Tom’s spirits are lowered, but then Al responds, “Tom. Maybe it’s been so long that you’ve forgotten, but people’ve already got a way of making more people.” He offers a tight-lipped smirk buried under his moustache, and waggles his brow again. “Just because you and I are too old to get up to it anymore, doesn’t mean it’s a bad method.”

“But you understand what I’m suggesting,” Thomas repeats, hopefully; pleadingly. He knows the body, but he doesn’t know metal and wire. They’ve learned a little from each other over the years, but not enough. He needs Albert. He  _ is _ pleading.

He waits a long time for an answer. Al takes a deep breath, and leans forward onto the table, breaking eye contact. He rubs his chin, stretches his mouth thoughtfully, looks in every direction except back at his colleague. Finally, he lets his breath out with a loud noise approaching a whistle, and slaps his hand down on the table. “Tom. Goddamn it, I don’t know. What it sounds like you’re suggesting… It  _ sounds _ like… like you want to use some kind of old, crazy hoodoo you dug up, to raise the…” He pauses with the words on his tongue. “To raise the living dead?”

“No. That’s not what we’re doing,” Thomas corrects him quickly; then he drops into a conspirator’s whisper. “We’re building something  _ new _ out of the dead. Using some of what’s there to make something else. There’s a word for that - for making a person, out of inanimate things. They call that a  _ golem _ .”

>>>

Rock sat still, looking at the floor from the red leather seat of a stool. It was a worn-out piece of furniture that had seen a great deal of use lately as a place to sit one of them down while the doctors hovered all around it, twisting and tweaking and cutting and suturing. Rock’s arm was up and back, strapped to his head so it could go limp while Thomas tinkered away in the hole cut into Rock’s underarm.

Tom worked without saying much. Once he had an understanding of the problem, it was merely an issue of resolving it. That was something he had experience in, at least - the act of digging around inside a person’s body to solve a problem. Though, Rock’s body was unlike a human’s, much of the compact meat and bone now replaced by steel scaffolding, so that when Tom opened him in the right places, he found easy-to-see-to recesses carved out and built over, with sturdy new vessels running through them. 

The nuts and bolts, however, were things he needed to focus on carefully. Albert could have put Rock’s destroyed shoulder back together in the time it would have taken Tom to courteously put the coffee on for him. But Albert wasn’t there. He was off somewhere, putting other things together. Putting other men together. So, Thomas worked with hands that were slow to handle the cords and rings and other parts that reinforced the boy’s joints, following schematics Albert had cooked up with some anatomical help from Tom. Schematics he was thankful he’d had the presence of mind to duplicate and file away in his study. The book was gone, along with Al and his boys, but much of its pertinent content was still here, in some form at least, and so were Tom’s copies of their own work. The blueprints they’d made for these things were really a marvel, when he thought about it. The two of them were a hell of a team. It was a terrible shame what had happened to them.

He twisted a midsized steel nut, the lock washer underneath turning with it, until it stopped. Behind that washer was a flat one, and a coil of steel wire around a shaft, which descended in two strands down into Rock’s side where it had already been connected. Thomas twisted once more, harder, getting a few more degrees just to be certain. Rock looked at him, curious and a little uncomfortable, as the doctor wrenched his insides around.

Thomas stared at his work briefly, then grabbed a rag from the workbench behind him, and mopped up the viscous black-brown blood seeping from the opening he’d made. Without giving Rock time to worry about what came next, he reached in with his fingers, and snapped a small lever into position. Rock gasped and convulsed as if he’d been shocked. The pain was intense but very short lived, fading to a tingle within a second or two. The blood began flowing faster, and Thomas grabbed him by the arm and moved him back into place so he could finish. He forced the flesh together, secured it with a heavy staple, and then once both hands were free he went about suturing the wound properly, so the fluid would fill the recess rather than spill out.

“I doubled up the cables connecting your chest, shoulder, and upper arm. I think that should let your arms handle more strain,” he explained, emphasizing his uncertainty lest Rock try to stress-test his new ligaments. “But that leaves less room for the coil to grip the shaft, so… well, I’m not sure. If you feel anything slipping, come back right away. I made a mark on it so I can check on where it’s sitting, next time I open you up.”

Rock was hoping to avoid a “next time”, but his hopes were letting him down lately. The doctor had been silent for some time, but the workshop hadn’t been quiet. As always, Thomas had put on some loud, high-energy music to work to before getting started. Albert never bothered with that; his tinkering was dead silent. But thankfully it was also mercifully fast, apart from his clumsy sutures at the end. “Thank you, doctor.”

“You’re not an acrobat, you know. You’re strong, but you weren’t designed to fling yourself around like that. You’re too heavy. There’s seventy pounds of metal in your legs alone - you can’t go swinging it all over, and…” Thomas trailed off, exasperated. He tied and clipped the last suture, and applied a smooth plastic cover to them all. “Never mind. Just be careful. Use a ladder next time if you can,” he said, and Rock knew he was trying to be funny, but he was never a natural at that. He’d heard Albert make Thomas laugh before, but never the opposite. “Not a lumberjack either. You know what you’re doing with that?” He pointed to the saw on Rock’s other arm.

Rock lifted it up and turned his arm over, inspecting it. “I practiced turning it on and off for a while, and it cuts through metal fine. But I haven’t tried to use it in a fight yet. I don’t know if I should. It might be useful if something else needs cutting though, right?”

Tom shrugged, wiping his hands on the cleanest part of that same rag. “If you say so. Strictly speaking, I suppose it’s better to have it and not need it.” Rock looked up at him, narrowing his eyes questioningly. “... Than to need it and not have it,” the doctor elaborated.

“Oh. Okay.” He watched Thomas move through the workshop, toward the stereo. It was an old device, and the disc skipped when his footfalls got too close to it. He skipped over a few songs, listening to a fraction of a second of each, before settling on something to listen to. “Doctor? The music…”

Thomas turned, looking surprised. It was the first time Rock had mentioned it. “You like it?” he asked, smiling a little, for the first time that day. Rock tried to smile back, but he was still troubled. There was a question on his mind that he’d have to ask before he left, but he was putting it off until he knew exactly how to phrase it.

Rock listened to the music for a few seconds. The singer was talking about flying and fighting. A pilot in a war.  _ I’ve come a long, long way, on a real bad road.  _ He found that line… comforting. Not encouraging, but he felt its meaning inside. He didn’t have a word for that, but it felt all right. “It’s good. I think.” Thomas looked at him with an expression Rock recognized - he was being tested. His responses were being measured. “It’s…It doesn’t feel… appropriate, right now. But it still feels good. It makes me feel better. What is it?”

Thomas smiled, tongue in cheek. “What kind, you mean?”

_ But I’m afraid he’s got no will to go back home _

_ And he may just try to fight this thing alone _

There were more than one singer, it sounded like, calling back to each other. Thomas looked back at the stereo, seeming less happy for a moment, and his hand moved toward it, but he chose to leave it be. Rock sensed he was rethinking his song choice; it did seem awfully steeped in battle and strife, but he’d thought that was why the doctor had chosen it.

_ Well, I know I’ve said all this before  _

_ But have our backs and we’ll have yours _

_ Count on us, when it’s time to rock and roll! _

The doctor pointed a thumb at it. “People argue over labels all the time, but most people would call this kind of thing ‘rock and roll.’ Or, just ‘rock.’” He smiled again, and gave Rock a prodding look.

Rock looked between the doctor and his stereo. Then he raised a hand to his chest. “Is… Am I…?” He pointed at the stereo, and the doctor smiled more broadly than Rock had ever seen, doubling over slightly with an amused snort. It was a joyful sight that would stay with him for a long time. The music was loud, fast-paced; a bassline that climbed up and down alongside punchy percussion, and energetic brass that shouted out at just the right time.

_ The skies are moving past my eyes, at twice the speed of sound _

_ I’ve left behind the weaknesses that kept me on the ground _

_ My hand is locked around the stick, my trigger finger burns _

_ Whatever happens now, I’ll wreak the havoc that I’ve earned _

Thomas came over and freed Rock’s arm from the bindings so he could lower it. Rock sat with his arms hanging down between his legs, listening. Thomas listened as well, leaning back against the table, and every few seconds looked at Rock for a reaction, though the boy didn’t offer one, as focused as he was on the sound.

_ There’s a coming fight like none we’ve ever known _

_ And before it’s through, there’ll be an awful toll _

_ But this is how it has to be _

_ Now that they’ve brought this fight to me _

_ And I see ‘em up ahead _

_ Let’s rock and roll! _

As the song came to a brassy close, Rock turned his head and saw the doctor smiling again, stroking his beard. “I’m a music lover,” he said, turning the volume down until it was barely audible, though letting it play on as he talked. “The thing is… When it comes to troubles…” He paused, taking a thoughtful breath. “You see, when times are tough, people find it hard to hold onto some things. Troubles come and crush your good fortune. People become too tired to laugh and too broken to rage in the worst, most dangerous times.” 

He circled around the room, and laid his hand on Rock’s shoulder. “Music is different. In the worst of times, music only gets stronger. We  _ feel _ it more strongly. It gives us more. It’s that much more precious.” Thomas leaned over to catch the boy’s eyes. “What you said before, about it not feeling ‘appropriate’? Rock’s got a history of being inappropriate. In its early years, it was too much for a lot of people, which seems silly now. And you’re right; all these troubles, all the violence and worries… this isn’t an appropriate sound for it. But it makes us stronger. You listen to whatever music can dig inside you and bring out what you need. Rock is strong, and adaptable, and it finds a greater meaning in the worst of times by being the medicine we need to stand up. And no matter what people say or do and no matter what turn the world takes, I think we can count on it to never die.”

Rock held the doctor’s gaze. Thomas was still smiling, and Rock wanted to return it. “You named me after… that? Is that what you wanted me to be?”

“Well… I’d rather say that’s what I wanted  _ for _ you. Does that make sense? But yes, you are making a bad situation better, if you want to hear me say it. You’re doing things that have to be done. That’s worth everything right now.” Rock tried to smile again, but that question he’d been ruminating over was still keeping him down. He hung his head, and the doctor came around to his front, putting his hands on Rock’s shoulders. “Rock. What’s wrong? I thought you might find that kind of heartening.”

“Doctor… do they have to die?”

Thomas backed off a little. “What?”

“The others. The ones you’re sending me to destroy.” Rock said it with an almost accusatory edge. “You keep saying it has to be done. Why? Can’t we stop them some other way? Why do I have to…?”

“Rock.”

“Just tell me why! I’ll believe you, I promise! I’ll do it, but I have to know why!” It was pouring out of him now. There was a hole in the pitcher, and it was all coming out even faster than he tipped it.

“That’s very simple, Rock.” Thomas walked away, and shut off the music. “The reason is very simple. Tell me, boy… If I gave you a command, would you follow it?”

“What?”

“Simple question, Rock.” Thomas turned on him with an expression that suggested Rock was being tested again. Maybe it wasn’t so simple.

“Yes. Of course I would, doctor.”

“Would you ever stop? And give up on following it, if it wasn’t done yet?”

“N-… no.”

Thomas came back, and stared him down. “And if someone wanted to stop you, at all costs, from carrying out that command… What would they have to do?”

Rock lowered his head. The doctor wasn’t his enemy, in fact the furthest thing from it. Yet he couldn’t help but feel utterly defeated. “I guess… they would have to kill me.”

The doctor surprised him by looking pained at the thought. “Nothing is ever going to stop you, Rock,” Thomas said, his voice suddenly hushed and comforting. “You sure live up to your name that way. And I need you.” He reached over, picked up Rock’s hat, and pressed it into the boy’s chest. “You saved me, back when all this started. No one told you to, but you did. I never put the desire inside you, but whether told to or not, you  _ want _ to keep people safe from Albert and his men. And you’re the only one left to do it. And you won’t stop until it’s done, the only way it can be done.” The doctor walked away, leaving Rock to stare into the dark interior of the navy blue. 

“And that’s why?” he asked. 

“That’s why.”

>>>

Shot after shot rang out, echoing off the glimmering walls of the mine. It was an underground operation, yet it needed little in the way of lighting; as Rock had ventured deeper into the tunnels and rooms, something strange was unearthed and found in greater abundance. He recognized the matte bluish-grey of the stone walls as looking much like the piles of stone carried on the train. But the crystals were new to him. They shone in an icy light in the presence of the lamps down below. And Albert wanted them, something to do with making more weapons, Thomas had said, so he’d sent one of his men to ensure they’d come to him.

Rock had felt a predictable apprehension when he’d first laid eyes on the master of the mine, a bald foreman in blue coveralls and - in a surprising regard for regulation - a yellow safety helmet, who had greeted him with a sneer. As always, there were no negotiations. But Rock was struck with a greater fright when the foreman drew a gun. One like Rock’s.

He’d really had no good reason to think that none of Albert’s men would be armed like him. Albert had made the guns himself. They were his design, and this was his revolution. But Rock’s first two battles had made him much too comfortable in the idea that he alone held that advantage. He’d been fooling himself. Rock dove behind a pile of quarried stone, hoping the consistency of the broken pile might protect him; he’d seen the shots from those guns fly right through sheets of steel, but perhaps something less clean and sturdy would misdirect them.

The foreman whipped his head around, looking for something. On his helmet was a compact flashlight (upon meeting, he’d introduced himself as Flash, and tapped his head, which under any other circumstance would have been comically listless naming on Albert’s part). It painted Rock’s cover as a haunting shadow on the wall when he looked directly where Rock was hiding. Courageous at heart though he may have been, Rock shrank down at the sight of that shadow, his lungs coming to life just to choke on a gasp.

“I gotcher. I gotcher, you little sonofagun,” Flash growled. He had a pronounced underbite that gave his speech a twisted quality. He fired three shots, sinking them all into the pile of junk stone, and the rubble shivered under Rock’s body, but he didn’t feel the sting of the hot yellow bullets reach him. Flash reloaded, and fired again, spraying the room with superheated rounds. 

As they’d fought before, Rock had noticed something. A few of their shots had sunk into clusters of the icy-blue crystals in the walls. The crystals had shattered, but in doing so had given off a burst of light. In those glowing halls, it had turned the initial volley of bullets into strobe-lit mayhem.

Flash’s headlamp flicked around the room as he fired, and an explosive lightshow carried on as he slung ammo all around. Rock had the thought that maybe Flash was trying to disorient him. If he kept a cool head, and waited until the foreman reloaded, he could spring out and catch him between cartridges. He laid back, listening, trying to make sure Flash wasn’t approaching his hiding place. His eyes moved over the cave wall in front of him, up towards the ceiling. He was briefly aware of a densely-packed cluster of crystals ten feet off the ground, practically staring him in the face. Then another shot rang out, and the world turned white.

Rock couldn’t help but cry out as his vision left him, and when he did, the foreman began cackling from behind. “I gotcher! Ha, ha! Say yer prayers, kiddo! Yer done fer, now!” Panic set in. Rock squeezed his eyes shut as he staggered to his feet, and when he opened them, he could see just a bit more than that sheet of white he’d seen moments ago. But it wasn’t enough, and he couldn’t know if it would get better. Now, or ever.

Maybe it was his nature to get his strength from defiance, that quality the doctor had named him for. Whatever it was, it was a little ironic that in his moment of helplessness he nearly resigned to his fate, yet the second he felt his enemy collide with him and slam his back to the wall, his will to fight came back to him. The world was a blur of dark and light, but he felt a gun barrel stick into his chest. He grabbed it, and with all his might forced it into the air. The sound was tremendous but he paid it no mind. He hadn’t kept track of how many were left in Flash’s weapon, but the foreman had had a moment to reload before the struggle, so his objective now was just to keep it away from himself.

He still had a full cartridge. At worst, he was up three to two. That was something. Maybe all he had, but it was something. He brought his gun arm around, and pointed it where he thought Flash’s chest might be, not willing to gamble on the head in a tussle like that. He fired the very same instant he felt Flash knock it away. Two to two.

“Jest give up, you sonofa-!” Flash cracked his head against Rock’s, though it accomplished little as, if they were anything alike, there was a thin plate of metal stronger than his work helmet in both their heads. It broke up the rhythm of their struggling though, and gave him a second to aim and fire at Rock’s head. Like before, he made the mistake of pressing the barrel right up against the blinded boy’s skull. Rock shoved forward and tried to move his head out of the way. The bullet burned across the back of his neck, and the shot rang viciously in his ear, but he wasn’t dead. Two to one.

The foreman continued grunting and growling, while Rock wordlessly fought for his life. He held his gun low, intending to fire into Flash’s stomach. He thought it would catch his enemy off-guard. Unfortunately, Flash didn’t need to feel the barrel of the gun to react to it. Rock felt it move in his hand, and then it was ripped away from him, and tossed somewhere he couldn’t see. The fight still a mess of blue, black, and white in his eyes; he also didn’t see Flash’s gun coming at him, smashing into his jaw, though dealing more insult than injury. But that was the least of his worries. Zero to one.

Flash pressed his gun against Rock’s neck. Rock grabbed it with both hands, forcing it off its mark with some effort. But this time, it didn’t fire. Flash had all the time in the world now to deliver the killing shot. He wasn’t about to waste his last bullet. He growled a taunt, inches from Rock’s face, struggling to talk as they each put all their strength into pushing the gun around. “Gotcher, kid… This’ll be over… in a… a flash,” he said, and started to laugh at his own awful punchline.

Flash went on laughing, and if nothing else, it made it easier for Rock to keep the gun away. But he was still at a complete disadvantage, he realized. He had nothing. Flash had all the power now, and Rock was defenseless. Or that was how it seemed, before one last idea hit him. It was risky (and for that matter, more gruesome than he’d have liked), but no more than letting this standoff continue. So he chose his moment and went for it.

Rock twisted himself off the wall, and turned around to put his back to the foreman, who grunted in surprise as the struggle quite literally turned around on him. Rock moved his grip around, and trapped Flash’s gun arm against him with his right elbow, wrapping the fingers of his right hand around the wrist. The two of them stumbled around together as Flash tried to shake him off, but Rock pushed them both sidelong against the wall, digging in his heels to keep their shoulders both pressed against the stone.

_ Kachack. Whirr. _

At the sound of the saw powering on, it took Flash a second to realize what was happening. “Whatcher doin’?! Whatcher think yer-... No, no, you sumbitch, no yer not!! No!!” Flash writhed in place and clawed at Rock’s arm. Rock could only make out the vague shape of their right arms laid together against the wall. Before things got any harder, he threw caution to the wind, and drove the blade straight into Flash’s forearm, who roared in protest. First came blood as one of the thick vessels was cut into, spilling onto the cave floor. Then the sound of the saw’s fine and hardened teeth, specifically made to eat through metal in that factory, meeting the steel laid next to bone. The saw jumped slightly as it caught the cords in Flash’s arm, which frayed and gave up their strength. Flash’s grip on his weapon slackened, and it fell to the floor. 

“No! Nooo! Gittoffa me!” Flash screamed, hurling his weight to one side. Rock lost his footing, and they both went staggering off the wall. The saw jumped and bit into Rock’s arm as it left Flash’s. Rock heard Flash hit the floor, but he wasn’t concerned with him just yet. He knew whereabouts the foreman’s gun would have landed. He dove back to the right, searching the floor with eyes that were still seeing less than they should. He found the weapon, grabbed it, and charged back into action before he could lose his chance.

He took aim at Flash, but there was no more movement, no more struggle. He could see just well enough to barely make out the features on Flash’s face. There was neither anger nor humour there anymore. Flash was holding his ruined arm in his remaining hand, heaving strained breaths as he looked at what was left of it dangling by wire and cold skin, and his life, such as it was, draining out.

“You… you sumbitch, lookit what… Lookit whatcher done. Lookit whatcher  _ done _ ta me!” he wailed, his wretched voice turning into something like a cat’s cry. Everything he was before had turned to anguish. Everything Rock had been, it turned to pity. Pity, and duty. Without a word, he moved closer, as close as he had to to be sure he was seeing straight, and raised the gun to Flash’s head. 

The foreman shivered, clutching at what was lost. “Don’t. Don’t send me back.” No sooner did that last word leave his mouth did the last shot leave the chamber. Zero to zero, and that was that. Rock sat for a long time, waiting for his vision to return, before giving up to make his way out of the mine with less than perfect clarity. The people toiling in the tunnels were already gone, so he walked alone in silence. The foreman’s last words haunted him all the way up.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Note: Those lyrics are something I wrote for another fan project, but they work really well as a little aside. (Mega Man is already steeped in musical references, it felt right to embellish this section.) I was advised to let readers know they're original lyrics. If you're familiar with the subject matter, you might even be able to figure out which character is singing at the end of the song!


	4. Watched From Afar

The humans had long since cleared out, though he could see them still in the near distance. It wasn’t far back to town on foot. Near enough that the lack of conveyance wasn’t much of a deterrent. Rock had walked there himself, and now he faced a long walk back, his mind heavier than ever before with troubling thoughts.

A small handful of crystals from the mines scraped and jangled lightly in his pocket. He couldn’t exactly haul it all back to the workshop, but the doctor would appreciate a decently-sized sample, he thought. Maybe it would help somehow.

 _Don’t send me back._ Rock knew what he came from. The darkness of his mind, illuminated mostly by the System, contained a trace of whatever - whoever - he’d been before, and he had a certain understanding of things beyond what he was told. Certain things that he didn’t need to be told. Some things needed a reminder, and they’d come back to him when the doctors mentioned just the right subject. By far most things that had once filled the head he wore on his shoulders were now gone forever. Other things he had vague knowledge of, and still others he’d recalled as quickly as he’d relearned to speak. He was a body, preserved by burning sand and remade by moving metal, the remains of someone else and yet his own man in a meaningful sense. Thomas said he’d never be the person the body had come from. But he wondered if maybe he’d turn out much like that person someday, just by chance.

Or maybe he’d hate himself. He hated holding the gun. He did as he was told, he did what needed to be done, but he hated it, because something about holding the gun made him feel like everything was coming apart. The ground beneath him, the air around him, the flesh and clothing hiding his creaking joints; holding the gun in his hand, everything stayed solid but at the same time felt as if it was all splitting apart, into a thousand pieces he couldn’t hope to gather up.

Rock slowed, and stopped, leaving his boots half-buried in the sand once he’d limply shuffled his feet to a halt. His hand moved for the gun. He felt the sands nearly drop out from under him, felt his fingers come undone for a moment. Without duty and fear to focus his thoughts, brushing the grip with his thumb summoned an invisible dark to rush over him, even as he squinted into the sun.

He shook his head and shoulders, casting off the anxious gloom he’d summoned. He pulled off his hat, letting his dark hair free again so the sun could warm his head. All except that spot around his temple, the hole which the doctor had filled in with something inert and unfeeling while putting him together. A hole surrounded by a jagged ring of scorched-black scar tissue. He resolved not to think about any of it, not to feed the hungry devils riding his thoughts of the foreman’s dying words.

_Thump. Thump. Clunk. Clunk._

It was far away, far enough that Rock didn’t immediately recognize the noise as external. He at first thought he was hearing his own blood pumping as he stood so still and quiet. Maybe a joint catching, muffled by a well of fluid. But as it grew louder, he became more certain that someone was behind him. Not close behind, but they were there. Very slowly, as if he could will it away before seeing it, Rock turned to meet the encroaching presence - first his head, then his body, from his shoulders to his feet.

There was indeed another person there, coming toward him from the direction of the mine. They must have lay in wait for him, he realized, hiding until Rock was far out in the open. Their heavy footfalls suggested no attempt at stealth. Soon, despite the sun’s glare in one eye and the way the figure’s colour merged with the sand somewhat, they were close enough that he saw who came for him. Glaring from under a folded hat that let the sun touch his neck on that side, out from the nothing of the desert strolled a man in red. A man whose eyes carried the same cold light, and whose face was marked by the same thin seams, as Rock’s and all the others’.

Rock faced his visitor, but didn’t make a move. The man in red drew steadily closer, but there was no aggression in his stride. For a second, Rock dared to hope that someone was here to help him, to lighten his burdens. Then the stranger drew a gun.

“Draw.”

Rock fumbled for his gun. Over a long, stretched-out instant in time, he had the thought that he should have been dead already; he had been looking down the enemy’s rifling for as long as his nervous fingers had been grasping for the handle of his weapon. But it wasn’t until they found purchase and freed it from its holster that the man in red at last decided to fire. Rock didn’t see where the shot went. All he knew was that he wasn’t hit. He raised his gun, and taking a little too long himself, he fired. Before he’d even squeezed the trigger, the man in red was already in motion. He hid himself behind the arm of his free hand, which had something heavy bolted to it; a wide, thick sheet of ridged steel was fastened to him. Rock heard his shot ricochet off of it, though he couldn’t pick out the spot among the other severe divots in its surface. The man in red had apparently been drawing fire before now.

Something about this duel didn’t feel like his previous battles, and Rock hesitated to fire again, despite his fear of retaliation. Instead, he held his gun steady and called out. “Who are you?!”

The man in red holstered his weapon, and raised his hand, signalling a ceasefire. Though grateful for the return to peace, Rock was uncertain and barely lowered his weapon, until the stranger flapped his hand downward, impatient, waiting for Rock to drop his guard before speaking. Once both guns had been put away, the talking could start.

“Good aim. Shame that it’s wasted on you.”

<<<

In the solemn, dim light of the lower workshop, there are three figures. Thomas, who is leaning back on a table against the wall, is watching his friend. Albert, supporting his weight on a workbench, and with a dreadful expression that makes Tom worry what he’ll say, is watching the third figure. That third is bolted to a table. A young man’s body, with brown hair and tight, nervous lips, is turning his head back and forth, watching the doctors, looking almost wary of them.

Thomas has the radio on, but very little is coming out of it anymore. Sometimes it picks up a distant signal, perhaps from a better place, where people still have time in their day to share music with the world. Sometimes there’s nothing but noise. Until twenty or so minutes ago, there had been a broadcast of a man with a thick accent playing guitar and singing a song about forgetting friends, while someone else played an accordion slowly in back. Then the singer had stopped, said something in another language, and the broadcast had ended.

Music lover though he is, Tom lets the quiet static remain the only sound in the room. Albert is deep in tumultuous thought, he can tell, and it feels wrong to clutter the atmosphere. Instead, he picks up his mug, and takes a long time to search the inside of it while he waits for Albert to speak first. He savours the last few drops of the coffee Al had made, grateful that as of yet, coffee and tea have not become as scarce as music. Or new clothes. Or new people.

“Could you do this to me, Tom?”

Thomas quickly puts his mug down, and gives Albert his full attention. “Beg your pardon?”

“This.” Albert, though remaining mostly still, points his finger at the boy fastened to the table. “Could you do this to me, if you wanted to?” The boy watches the offending digit, and dares to meet Albert’s eyes. Tom can see Albert visibly draw back.

“You’d have to be dead first,” Thomas says, crossing his arms. A full and direct response seems like the thing to give. “It would be difficult, doing it just by myself. But now that we’ve worked it out together, and we’ve got notes… I suppose so. Why?”

“Could you do it to anyone? I mean, anyone you wanted?” Albert rises up a little, fixing Thomas with an intense stare.

“Al, what’s wrong?”

“What happened here? What happened to this boy?” he shouts, and waves his hand at their creation. “The boy he used to be! Is this him? Or is his soul somewhere up there, looking down, watchin’ us do all this to ‘im?! Where’d he go, Tom?! Where would _I_ go, tell me that!”

Though he could have seen this conversation coming, Thomas isn’t at all prepared for it. Ruminations on the soul aren’t something he concerns himself with. “The System is most of what’s in there. Not much person left. He won’t…” Tom pauses, rubbing his head, digging deep for something satisfactory to offer. “They only think as much as it’ll let them. There’s no… there’s no soul,” he says, hesitating as he catches the boy’s eyes. “Just basic thoughts, little scraps of thinking that’ll build up. Golems are servants, not… people.”

“And what’s the difference? Screw some wires into their head, pump them full of who-knows-what you’ve concocted there and string some steel rope through ‘em… Fill their heads with what’s in that book,” Albert cries, slinging an accusatory finger at the book on the table where it lies still and closed. “What’d happen to me, Tom? What about you, what if I jammed _you_ chock full of all this crap, what’d happen to you?! Where’d you go?!”

Thomas reaches over, and grabs the spine of the book in his fingers. He means to pick it up, and hand it over, hoping that answers from the source will do better than his own reassurances. He drops it back on the table when Albert slumps over, covering his head, and begins to shake. Tom lifts himself from his place, extending his hand forward with no idea what he means to do.

Finally, Albert lifts his head, and Thomas can see tears in his friend’s eyes. “... Where’s my goddamned family, Tom?”

There’s a moment of silence between them. Thomas breaks it with a quiet, pointless answer. “You know what I believe.” Which is nothing. Nothing that can’t be measured or made.

“Was my wife ever up there looking down on me? Or has she just been rotting in the ground, waiting for me to open up her head and wake her up?” He turns his teary gaze to the golem. The sadness in his look is quickly replaced by a spiteful anger that makes Thomas very nervous. Tom picks up the book again, and hustles to relinquish it.

“Al. Take this. Read it,” he says, ushering it into Albert’s hands, which are loath to grasp it. “Get the same understanding of it that I’ve got. I’ll never be able to explain it all myself.” Albert holds it flat, staring into the stack of pages between the covers, saying nothing. “Just read as much as you care to read. And if, in the end… If you don’t want to be a part of this anymore, just know that I’m grateful. I could never have come this far without you, but I won’t hold it against you if you go.”

“Go?” Albert chuckled weakly. “Tom, I _live_ in this godforsaken haunted house,” he says and casts another look at the golem. He stares down into the closed pages again, sighing shakily, his breath threatening to turn to sobs. “All I know… All I know is, if there _is_ someone out there, looking down on me…” He starts to laugh. “I hope they’re not lookin’ now. Not right now.”

>>>

“What?”

“Your aim is good, but you don’t have the guts to use it.” The man in red shook his head, hiding his eyes under the brim of his hat.

Rock moved closer. “Who are you?” he repeated.

The man in red raised his voice. “If I’d wanted to, I coulda dropped you with my first shot! You know that, don’t you?” He closed the gap with a few confident strides, and stuck a finger in Rock’s chest, who withdrew in surprise. “You gotta be a lot more ready to kill than you are.”

“You wanted me to kill you?” Rock asked, now wondering if this newcomer had all his bolts done up tight.

The stranger smirked. “Woulda proved something, at least. Don’t matter what you do to me, anyhow, I’m as good as spare parts. But you…” He got close, so close they practically shared each other’s shade. Rock could make out every seam around the light of his eyes, and hear the whisper in his voice, young but oddly rough. “You were sent to do this. You’re _gonna_ do this, whether you like it or not. Do or die. Unless I’m wrong,” he asked, lifting his head questioningly, “and you _do_ got a choice in all this?” Rock looked away, into the sand. “... All right. Then you gotta be ready to kill.”

“I am ready.” Rock looked up, with as defiant a look as he could muster. The man in red smirked at him again, like he was watching Rock run a maze with no exit.

“You ain’t. You ain’t ready, Rock,” he assured the boy, and the sound of his name from the stranger’s mouth shocked him a little. “And it’ll get you killed if you don’t fix it. I just wanna make sure you know that,” he said, and turned away. He started to walk, whistling as he went, in spite of it all.

“Where are you going?” Rock called, and the stranger answered without stopping.

“I’ll be around. Watching. Takin’ care of the things you ain’t. Don’t worry about it.” Rock began to follow, and didn’t stop until the man in red did. His back was still turned.

“Who _are_ you?” Rock asked one last time.

The man in red twisted in place, looking over his shoulder. He looked Rock up and down, his eyes catching on something. “I’ll tell you what.” He turned, and flicked his head at Rock, gesturing. “You gimme that scarf you got. Trade you my name for it. How’s that?”

Rock looked down at his chest, where he could see the drab yellow cloth bunched up around his neck and shoulders. It was fairly old, had been worn a lot by the look of it, and Rock didn’t know what this stranger could want with it. It meant something all right, but until now, the most he knew about its meaning was how the doctor had looked at it. When Rock had pulled it out of the corner on a cold night - just a couple of nights before he’d left for the factory - and put it on to keep the desert’s night air off his neck, the doctor had stared. Thomas had looked at him for a long time, his features sagging with emotions Rock couldn’t read, and then had walked away without a word. And when Rock had questioned him, all the doctor had said was, “If you want to wear it, you’d best take care of it.”

Rock climbed back out of his own memories, and looked at the man in red, who was waiting silently, expressionlessly, for an answer. Many questions ran through Rock’s head, and he struggled to find the one to ask, or even articulate it. He often had trouble with that sort of thing, and so it took him a long time to put together his response. “I’m sorry,” he answered at last, “but I don’t think this is mine to give away.”

The man in red slowly nodded, his eyes drifting blankly away. Then he turned away again, all at once. “I guess it looks fine on you anyway. See you around, Rock,” he said, and started off again, slinking away into the stillness of the desert.

<<<

Thomas twists the radio knob again and again, finding nothing. He gives up with a sigh. The old stereo there in the kitchen has other functions, but he doesn’t have a disc in it at the moment; all his albums are piled up in the workshop, where he needs them most. The kitchen is where they talk, the workshop is for work. It’s easy to talk where there’s air that’s more breathable, and tea, or coffee, or a plate of jerky and bread or some such thing to share.

Albert reaches over and shuts off the stereo completely, before returning to his initial position - his hands are laced together, against his mouth to hold his head up, and he’s staring Tom down, almost studying him. 

It would be unnerving, but every time Tom looks back at him, Al pops his eyebrows up. Over the years, Tom has come to know that as an expression of solidarity. They’d find themselves in a bad place, or in bad company, and they’d look at each other, and Thomas would stroke his beard, and Albert would raise his eyebrows, and it had been like a secret handshake they would share before returning to the problem.

“The hell are we going to do, Tom?” Albert finally asks, his voice muffled by his hands.

“Oh, I think you know what we need to do.” Thomas tilts his head with a knowing look.

“What? I don’t know. Pray?” Al drops his hands to the table. “Are you trying to be funny?”

Tom smiles. He is trying to be funny. But also, “We need to give the boy a name.”

“Oh hell.” Albert waves his hand dismissively. “He’s a prototype. First shot. Just call him number one. Number zero, it doesn’t matter.”

Thomas prods the table emphatically with his finger. “Now, Albert. I’m a firm believer that anything with a face deserves a name.”

Al lowers his face into his hand. “When did you grow a heart, you derelict old…” He shoots back up again. “Well, all right, what do you want to call it, then? What do you call something like that?” he asks, getting more disgruntled. He jerks a thumb back toward the stairs. “What do you name some… some vain creation, made by sad old men, too wrapped up in their troubles to make something reasonable?” he demands breathlessly.

Thomas plays with the radio knob with his finger, thinking. Something pops into his head that gives him pause, if only because it threatens to make him laugh. He thinks about it, his tongue in his cheek, holding back a smile. “Huh.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Note: I savour these moments of levity; as a cartoonist by trade, I'm not used to writing such downer stories. This is a reveal (and a joke) I've been waiting to get to. Now I can finally add that character tag (and stop lying to myself that nobody will see this character coming).


	5. The Heat is On

The road back was as he remembered it, though a little harder to see; his vision was still blurry. A hint of cracked pre-war asphalt lay buried under blowing sand, with dry brush and dun-coloured trees beside, crawling away from it into the desert. Wreckage and bodies were visible, mostly near the cliffs where battles had been fought, where bombs had exploded and some machines had had their armor peeled like fruit skins, while others had driven or been knocked over the cliffs’ edges, crushing their men inside where they landed. A few ruined units and dead men were closer to the road. Perhaps some had been on it, and particularly bold survivors had been forced to push them away so what remained of life could go on. He avoided looking at the faces of those whose withered forms now lay staring at the road.

There were weapons near the road that Rock didn’t know much about. Old world weapons that didn’t function without that world to support them. Winged bombs that had flown the skies, cracking into steel tube and shrapnel where they hit, leaving scorched earth and craters. One of those wrecks he’d seen had borne on its back some kind of cannon, unmistakable as such with its long barrel still reaching skyward; a dead and rotting hand, still heavily armed, reaching up from its grave and searching for something to take with it. At the base of that cannon were devices Rock did recognize. Charging conduits, arranged like the smaller ones that sprang from the grip of his pistol and fed into the chamber.

East of the road, and easiest to see as he passed the halfway point between the town and the mines, was the greatest and deepest hole he’d ever seen. Like a bowl made of sand, it was skirted by cliffs whose shapes seemed to lean away from it, as if afraid to fall in. There were hints, shapes and strokes in the sand, to tell of things buried there. A road lead away from the one Rock was on, and toward that crater. But as far as he could tell, nothing out there stood that one might travel to. So Rock stayed the course until he was home.

The town wasn’t normally much to look at. It was dusty and worn, with a lot of things buried in sand that didn’t work anymore. A lot of things that Rock wouldn’t have recognized even if he could see them above ground, because they stopped working during the war. What remained was a lot of wood and brick, as houses with metal sidings and decorations had been stripped for material years ago; trucks that ran on gasoline and diesel, and bikes leaned up against the outer walls of homesteads; a clock tower that was tended to every so often by an old woman who knew how to keep the cogs timed, whom the doctor had pointed out to Rock through a window some time ago. There was an era when people always knew the time, Thomas had said, but the machines that made it easy were gone now, and not everyone had a watch, so they looked to the tower. Life was a lot slower than it had been in his youth though, and he didn’t mind not knowing most of the time. Thomas knew the hour of the day by the sun, and Rock had learned to do the same.

But as Rock came back to town, things were just a little different. The people hadn’t returned. Or if they had, they were hiding, and staying quiet. No one in the streets. And the buildings were stripped further, Rock could tell. Whole sections of wall were gone, wood and brick and metal and all. Fences had been torn up. Homes had been dismantled. And most worryingly, things had been burned.

Most troubling of all, though, was what had apparently been done with what was taken. Rock inspected the clock tower several times as he made his way into town, and each time he looked it was more and more suspect. He had to get closer to make out the smaller details, but through his damaged eyes he made out the broad strokes almost as soon as he noticed their silhouettes. It had changed. Rather, someone had been making changes, and building onto it. Ramps and ladders and iron bars supporting it all, ramshackle construction leading up the tower’s side; it all lead skyward and terminated close to the tower’s peak in a covered balcony, draped with cords and conduits and crowned with wire antennae, and other mechanical forms Rock wasn’t sure of.

The doctor would know what was happening. Rock went back to the workshop. He hadn’t taken much damage during the fight with Flash, but his eyes worried him. He wasn’t sure Thomas could fix them the way he fixed tears and breaks in Rock’s larger components. At the very least, he needed to know for sure whether he’d be able to see straight again.

The workshop was a humble little thing up top. Bicycle and vehicle parts were piled up near where the truck used to be parked, before Albert had made off with it. Looking in through the side window showed a wide-open study with toolboxes on and under tables, and notes pinned to the walls. But the real work these days was done in the basement, away from prying eyes. There was a way down from inside, but Rock saw there was no one home at the ground floor. Thomas was working downstairs. He circled around to the storage shed. Inside was a hidden door that lead directly to the basement shop, and an intercom he could use to let the doctor know he was back.

Had Rock been thinking more carefully, he might have taken note of how odd it was that the shed, a large enclosure made of wood and sheet metal, had not been stripped for materials like much of the town had. It would have been a tremendous source of building supplies, yet when Rock went around back and walked inside, it was still standing and completely intact.

Inside were rows of standing metal shelves - also still present, despite their potential uses - full of many boxes of hardware. Some of those boxes of nuts and bolts and other parts had in fact been taken, but he wasn’t familiar enough with the doctor’s inventory to notice. Rock had to snake his way through the maze of shelving units until he could barely see the door through them, before he finally reached the rear wall where the hidden panel was.

He searched the corner for the intercom switch, tucked between two wooden supports, and opened the line. “Doctor? This is Rock. I’m back from the mine, and I think I need some repairs.” He let go of the button, and looked for the edge of the panel, waiting. It was hard to see, even if one was looking for it, as it lined up very well with the seams of the metal wall. Or rather, it was normally hard to see, but today was different. The top corner of the rectangular access panel was smashed inward. The intercom crackled back at him.

_ “Rock! Get out! Get out of the shed, now!” _ The doctor’s frantic voice came on the line, sounding like it never had before. Something was terribly wrong, it finally dawned on the boy. He turned to leave as he was told, though he was sluggish, wrapped up in alarm and confusion, unsure of where his feet should go as he turned to face the jungle of metal he’d just finished weaving through. He heard a heavy  _ clunk _ , and the sound of fluid draining. As he looked through the stacks and toward the door, he saw a silhouetted figure there in the doorway standing over a metal drum on its side. The reek of fuel filled the enclosure. The figure struck and held up a match, pausing as if to relish the moment, and then dropped it carelessly into the glistening stream at his feet. Within seconds the door, along with most of Rock’s field of view, roared with fire.

<<<

A boyish golem is screaming in pain on the ground, his legs tangled beneath him. He alternates between clutching at his own hands and mashing them against different parts of his body, trying vainly to relieve them of the agony they’re in. 

Thomas is kneeling beside him, confused. Albert crouches down opposite him, yelling, arguing. On the floor near the boy is a hot kettle, and the water is everywhere from the counter to the table, letting off steam as it cools.

“He’s not supposed to feel pain! He’s not supposed to feel  _ anything! _ ” Albert shouts over him, turning a demanding look upon Thomas. “What the hell’s this, Tom?! Why in the hell does he burn?!”

“Stop shouting, you’re just going to scare him! Here, boy,” Tom says softly, crouching down with a bowl of tepid water and ice. “Put them in here, quick.”

“‘Scare him’...?” Albert curls his lip. Thomas doesn’t answer, just shaking his head. “What is going on here?” Albert demands again. “What is-”

“I don’t know! It wasn’t accounted for! It wasn’t in the book, I… I didn’t know. I’m sorry,” he says, and puts his hand on the boy’s back. The golem takes heaving breaths, his hands shaking under the water, fingers curling back and forth.

“Tom… Are you apologizing to me, or to him?” Al asks, his face creased with bitter scrutiny.

“What? To him! Why would I apologize to you?” Tom asks sincerely. Both of them sense the strangeness in the air now.

Albert gets up from his knees, picks up the spilled kettle, and leaves them to go pacing around the room. He doesn’t leave them fully alone; he keeps an eye on them, staying silent from then on.

>>>

Orange fire, dark smoke, and the stink of gasoline. These things rapidly filled the air until the precious daylight beyond the door was lost to them, and Rock was left shrinking away from the hot metal frames and burning paper boxes that ruptured and spilled their contents. Rock wouldn’t suffocate, though his chest rose and fell sharply as the boy in him panicked, and he could feel the heat in the breaths he sucked in, and taste the smoke on them. But knowing he wouldn’t pass out from the smoke of course did nothing to make the fire less fearsome. It only meant that if he died there, his death would be far from merciful.

With no thought on his mind but staying out of the fire, it was all he could do to press his back to the wall, until the intercom was somewhere over his shoulder. The doctor’s voice was still screaming at him to get out; Rock had to wrestle his own senses free from panic before that voice rang clear to him again. Finally, a modicum of willpower restored, Rock turned around, and banged his fist on the hidden door. He mashed the intercom switch with his fingers. “Doctor! Open the door! Please!  _ Please!! _ ”

_ “It’s broken! They smashed the mechanism, I can’t! Rock, get out of there!”  _ Rock looked up again at the damaged corner of the door panel. 

“I… I can’t… there’s nowhere…” He turned to look into the flames, hoping that somehow the entrance would be visible again, that the flames would have died down and he could escape. Nothing but smoke and fire, closer than ever. He realized how hot his back had gotten in the few seconds he’d been facing away. He felt his hopes slipping away. He touched his gun. Felt a throb in his temple. There had to be a way out. He couldn’t let it end this way. He couldn’t let this happen to him. This couldn’t happen. This was not going to happen.

Please.

He heard a crack, much louder than the intercom. He searched through the fire, not sure what he expected to see. In the direction the sound had come from, the wooden support beam forming one of the ribs of the shed had split, the two ends now catching little fires on their splintered ends. The sheet metal screwed onto it had warped, and Rock could see a thin, crooked band of sunlight cutting through the smoke and fire. The panic drained into a lower chamber of his heart as a surge of bravado boiled to the top. He went to work.

_ Kachack. Whirr. _

The wood was surprisingly hard to get through; it splintered and rubbed the blade instead of shearing away in a shower of sparks like metal did under his saw. The extra seconds it took to cut away the framework were agonizing. Heat clung to his skin, and he had to shrink away farther and farther as flames licked at his shirt. If he caught fire, he didn’t know if he’d even have time to put himself out.

At last, the wooden frame was dismantled in a space a few feet wide, and Rock made quick work of the sheet metal. Time was running out. He didn’t cut a hole, something more like a flap. He kicked it as hard as he could, knocking it farther outside with each blow, and once there was an opening large enough to slip through, Rock wasted no time escaping. He ducked down without one more glance at the fire, and rolled his way to safety.

So he thought. Unfortunately, the kiss of fresh, cool air was not something he’d have a moment to savour. He rolled, and in doing so he soaked himself in the river of liquid running around the shed. It was all over his shoulders and neck now, and he could smell it. That same reek of fuel from before. Rock had seen the arsonist kick all the fuel from one drum into the shed. This second stream of fuel meant that he was still there, and still setting fires, and now Rock was soaked and ready to ignite at the slightest spark. There was no time for his fear to subside, especially given what followed.

Footsteps came from around the other side of the shed. Rock turned toward the sound, reaching for each of his weapons in turn and realizing he dared not use either one while he was a walking oil wick. A fat man in a padded yellow jacket rounded the corner, creeping and glancing like a rat on countertop, holding a box of matches. He drew one out, looked up from it, and the two of them locked eyes. The enemy was far more surprised than Rock was, in spite of what the boy had been through. He stuttered and grunted, and fumbled his matches, spilling them over the ground. Rock took his chance. For once, although his enemy still stood, there was nothing for him to do but flee.

He sprinted from the battle, desperate to put as much distance between himself and the flames as possible. He tried in vain to shake the fuel from his clothing, but it had soaked in deep. The scarf was particularly heavy with it, and so Rock pulled it off and carried it in his hand. He’d find somewhere to toss it. The doctor had told him to take care of it.

Thomas had also told him the name of the fat man now clumsily pursuing him. This one had earned a name for himself in the days before the coup, and afterward Rock had been told about him, and what he was called. The doctors had been referring to him as The Heat, so named because he was, against all odds and against every instinct he should have had, obsessed with fire. Lighting it. Watching it. Feeling it. Rock didn’t need to be attacked with a barrel of burning gas to know that this one was out of his mind.

Something flew over his shoulder from behind. It was red and burning, relatively small. A flare, though he’d never encountered one and did not recognize it. What he did recognize was that The Heat was trying to ignite him. Rock turned just enough to look behind. His enemy was giving chase, and lighting another of those burning rods to toss at him, wheeling it through the air like a throwing knife.

They were running through the streets now, and Rock had to slow down, unsure of where to go. The sound of his pursuer gaining on him only made him frantic. He couldn’t draw and fire, or even activate the saw. Both carried the risk of lighting up the fumes wafting away from his clothes. He had to hide. Better yet, he had to get back to the workshop, back to familiar terrain, and find a solution. He made a sharp right down a path between buildings, and The Heat no longer had a line of sight. Searching for a place to hide, Rock saw a stone half-wall built into the side of a strange home, and took the opportunity. He dove down into cover, and for a precious moment, the chase halted.

He heard The Heat’s footsteps come closer as he reached the same corner Rock had taken. Those feet slowed down, and stopped, close enough for Rock to make out the sound of boots grinding indecisively in the dirt as their owner looked around.

Silence, for a few seconds. And then, “Almost makes you feel alive, don’t it?” came a sluggish, doughy voice. Silence again. “Don’t it, though? Rock? It don’t feel like nothin’ else, you know what I mean?”

Rock very nearly asked him what the hell he was talking about. Then realized he was being goaded into giving away his position, and shut right up.

“Come on. You ever… You ever do it, burn y’self, just to feel like somethin’?” He heard a match being struck. Quiet. Groaning. Then that doughy voice took on a chillingly sharp timbre when The Heat let out a short scream, and a barking laugh. Rock could picture him holding that match somewhere tender, jolting away from it, amusing himself with the pain. He really was crazy. But then, given what made them what they were, it was shocking more of them weren’t.

“You’re gonna die today, Rock. But you’ll feel alive. You’re gonna die feelin’ like you’re finally alive. That’s gotta be worth dyin’ for… right?” Rock stayed quiet. He balled up the scarf, and set it down under his hat, which was mostly dry, but not enough for his liking. His shirt was a mess too, but the saw would have to come off before he could do anything about that. Too much was happening. Too many problems to solve. “Come on!” The Heat suddenly bellowed at him. “Rock… You think you’re clever, huh? I didn’t hear you runnin’. So I know you’re hidin’. And there ain’t a lotta hidin’ places here. You don’t fool me.” Rock froze up. He searched, but saw no way out that wouldn’t expose him again. He heard another match, and something igniting. Rock was cornered where he was. If The Heat did guess where he was, and took him by surprise, that would be the end. If he was bluffing, and Rock exposed himself, that could be curtains, too.

If he was going to risk his life, it may as well be on his feet, with his enemy in his sights, he decided. Rock sprang from cover, hurdling the wall back the way he came. He glanced toward The Heat, who once again seemed startled to see his enemy, and made sure to get a look at what had been lit. A bottle, mostly full, with a burning wick dangling from the top. A firebomb.

“Hah!” The Heat wheezed, and hurled the bottle. It tumbled through the air, and smashed against the corner of the stone wall, splashing fire all around. Rock was already long gone, twenty feet away from the edge of the flames by the time they were on the ground, and running down the street again. “Hold still, Rock! It’s time for you to  _ live! _ ” he screamed in that harsh timbre again.

Rock weighed his options. Firing was still not the brightest idea in his condition. Even if he held that gun far away from his chest, where most of the fuel was still soaking downwards through the weave of his shirt, there was still a risk, and it wasn’t one he was willing to take. Not after feeling the fire touching his shoulders just minutes before. He could hardly bear to imagine it.

But he had another, more agreeable plan in mind now. He looped back through the streets toward the workshop again. There was something outside he could use. The Heat was on his heels, but either couldn’t light anything while running or just couldn’t throw straight, because the chase went on without one more lick of fire going up. Finally he reached his own backyard and, stalling only a second or two, he found what he needed. Two pails outside the workshop, full of dirty, debris-filled water. Quenching pails, for cooling off brazed metal so it could be handled right away. Water wasn’t exactly scarce but it wasn’t worth wasting either, so these were left outside for Albert to dunk hot metal into, covered loosely with their tops to keep the water from evaporating longer.

Rock was far enough ahead of his far less spry enemy to have time to act. He picked up one of the pails, threw the top aside, and began pouring it over his neck and shoulders. Cool water and black motes of waste and residue ran down his body, soaking his clothes and, he hoped, diluting the fuel. Between the sudden respite from the heat on his skin and the sense of greater safety, it was perhaps the most profound and palpable moment of relief he’d known in his short life.

“Hold it right there, boy!” The Heat caught up, and stumbled to a halt about forty feet from where Rock stood dripping wet. Rock still had the pail suspended overhead, empty and dribbling, and The Heat’s eyes followed it as he lowered it down and dropped it into the sand. “Oh. Oh I see. I see what you did. But if you think that’s gonna save you…” He’s been carrying a match and a firebomb in his hands the entire time, waiting for his chance to use them. He struck the match, holding it in front of his face, savoring the scent of fire and sulfur. “... Then you don’t know fire like I know-” An arc of warm, filthy water collided with The Heat, soaking the bomb’s wick and dousing the match. He closed his eyes against it, and when he opened them, Rock was still holding the second, now empty, quenching pail.

“I know it doesn’t much care for water,” Rock said, and threw the pail aside.

“Aw, you smart-mouth li’l so-n’-so. Can’tcha understand, I’m just tryin’-”  _ thwipPOW!  _ A bullet sank into the sand at his feet, followed closely by the unmistakable sound of its firing. Rock’s gun was still holstered, and still he didn’t draw it. Instead both he and The Heat turned in surprise to where the shot was ringing from. The clock tower. “The hell’s that?”

Rock had to squint, the glare of the sun creating little streaks and spots in his hardly-working eyes. Climbing the haphazard scaffolding that ran up the tower’s sides, he made out the blurred form of a man, hanging from one arm and presumably firing from the other. Though he couldn’t made out any more than that, given the figure was firing on his enemy, he knew exactly who it was. “It’s… him.”

“It’s who, now?” The Heat demanded.  _ thwipPOW!  _ Rock saw the pants blow out around The Heat’s shin, who gasped with pain. “Oh, hell! Hell,  _ no! _ You sons a’ guns is workin’ together!” A third bullet hit the sand as The Heat lunged forward. Rock had no time to draw a weapon - rather, just enough time to wish he had. The Heat grabbed him by the chest, and with a little wobbling to and fro, hurled him to the ground, and planted a foot on his back. Rock pushed himself up, but The Heat was as heavy as he looked, and presently throwing all that weight down to keep him in place.

Rock heard another match being lit. There was nothing nearby to smash a firebomb against, no pavement or wall to break the bottle. He couldn’t see what was happening above him but it couldn’t have been good for him. His gun was still at his side though, and his hand was free. He snatched it up as quick as he could, and aimed blindly overhead. Two shots, saving the last, and he heard a cry that said he’d hit his enemy, though The Heat still stood and pressed him down. Another firebomb hit the sand in front of Rock, just a foot or two away from his face. The wick was lit, and fell out, spilling fuel over the ground. Most of it soaked in, but as the puddle grew and touched the flame, the earth still caught fire, so close as to reflect in his eyes.

Rock could hear The Heat grunting and wheezing with fear as he fumbled for another. The bottles could be heard clinking against one another somewhere on his person; he still had a number of them left, more than one at least. He could well just douse Rock with them and burn him up, given the chance, and that was very likely what he was up to.

_ thwipPOW! _

“Aagh!  _ Aaaooohh, ha, ha! _ ” Rock felt the pressure suddenly lift from his back. At the same time, he felt heat - aggressive, searing heat - on the back of his legs. He scrambled away from his foe, rolling to a stop on the ground. His legs were on fire. So was The Heat’s ass. The Heat spun in place, patting himself down, howling, laughing, and Rock could see a broken bottle hanging off his waist, next to two full ones, cloth wicks stuffed down their necks.

Rock rubbed his legs down, smeared them with sand and dirt, snuffing out the flames as fast as he could. The burns were minor, but he still felt an irrational terror at the sight of the fire crawling up on him, far beyond what the pain or even the danger warranted. He dropped his gun, fighting off the flames, unmindful of anything but the desperate fear they filled him with. He saw nothing but the fire, until it was out. He stared down at his legs, as if looking at an empty window where moments before he’d glimpsed a devil’s face looking in on him. Trying to decide if the horror had been as real as it seemed.

That danger passed, he finally pulled his gaze up, and saw The Heat holding another bomb, only just now composing himself, menacing Rock with the bottle. His enemy was more than insane - he was wrong. Not incorrect,  _ wrong _ . He was a wrong thing, to be so much like them and yet revel in the horror of fire. So Rock felt no pity. 

The Heat slung the bottle down like the handle of a knife. A burning stream of liquid came out in an arc, and Rock rolled away from where it hit the sand, scooping up his gun again. He fired his last shot, and it sank into his enemy’s gut, who groaned and gaped as the pain and shock hit him. He staggered forward, reaching behind his back for another bomb, his face still contorted with the disconcerting pain of his injuries. He raised the bottle.

Two more shots rang out from the distance. The second only succeeded in blowing off one of the fingers on The Heat’s free hand, but an instant before that, the first had already struck the bottle, shattering it, and igniting what was inside. For a moment, both of them were stunned, unsure of what really just happened, but it quickly became clear. Some of The Heat was still wet, particularly his jacket. But his face had already dried in all the heat and movement of the fight. The fuel clung to his head, his neck, his shoulder and legs as it cascaded down, already burning from the heat of the blazing shot that had ripped through it. The Heat gasped. He laughed. He screamed. He went on laughing, and went on screaming.

Rock had already reloaded. By the time The Heat had dropped to his knees, his gun was raised and it took only a second to steady his aim. Rock had no thoughts of mercy when he pulled the trigger. He only wanted the horror to end, to no longer see this creature flail and laugh and scream and melt in the fire he so perversely adored.

There was little noise, after. The echo of the shot faded, giving way to the shudder of Rock’s lungs, and the crackle of the dying fire. He had never felt hatred before. Fear, anger, defiance. All of that. But he hated this thing. And he realized something else.

He’d felt all those things for Albert, as well. Albert had given him reason, over the course of his existence, to fear him, to defy him, to resent him. Albert had never treated him the way Thomas had. He’d enacted twisted games and tests with rules only he’d understood, and talked to Rock as if the boy was a thing he’d throw away if it didn’t work right. And Albert had made his men what they were, told them things in secret, made murderers and monsters out of them. Made  _ this thing _ out of them.

Hate swelled up in his head, like a balloon of hot acid inflating until it pressed against the backs of his eyes. Albert wasn’t just dangerous. He wasn’t just a threat to the only human being Rock trusted. He wasn’t just a bad man. He was a maker of horrors. He was a maker of things that made the wet bones and dull flesh of Rock’s dwindled humanity want to vomit with an outrageous, loathing disgust.

But that loathing didn’t grant him strength. It made him crumple, fall into the sand and shake, covering his face. Too much. It was too much. It had to be him. He had to do this. He’d been  _ told  _ he had to do this, so he had to do this. But it was all too much. The doctor was wrong. Not  _ wrong _ , but incorrect. Rock wasn’t driven only by a desire to help. That wasn’t the reason. That wasn’t  _ why. _ Trust, fear, hate, goodness, defiance, obedience… Nothing made sense; nothing felt like an answer. He had to do it. He’d been told he had to do it, and he had to do it. He had to, for no other reason than… he had to.

Maybe that was all he needed to know. Or maybe that was all he was capable of knowing.

Maybe they had made him that way. Maybe they’d done that on purpose. Maybe…

He took his hands away from his eyes, uncurling his body. The sun hurt. The tower was still there. A body still hung to one side from it, watching him. Neither of them moved for a time. Then Rock got up to his knees. That seemed to be what the other figure - the man in red, he was sure - had been waiting for. The moment Rock displayed that he wasn’t dead, the man in red started climbing again, and disappeared into the scaffolding.

Rock wanted to join him. The man in red seemed to have answers, gave the impression he knew things Rock didn’t. Rock wanted to be beside someone who knew something, who wanted to help. Not just tell him what to do and that he was right to do it, but help him.

But now was not the time. He was alive. He had to let the doctor know. And he needed to be fixed. He needed to know if he  _ could _ be fixed. Blinking back the sun-streaks in his eyes, Rock closed the short distance between himself and the front door, and went down to the basement; down under the earth again where it was safe.

<<<

The golem is shaking on the ground, his legs crossed under him, and has finally calmed down to a point where he can be spoken to. His breath is mostly still, but every so often he flexes his hand, testing the flesh, and a pained twitch causes a sniff or a snort to come out. His hands won’t heal, exactly, but the stuff in his veins will fill in some of what was lost beneath the surface, if anything. As for the pain, the book said nothing of it. And in kind, it said nothing of how to stop it. Yet, as minutes pass, the boy seems more at ease, and Thomas has seen many a patient survive through a fading pain. He’s confident that the worst is over.

“Well,” he starts, putting his hand on the golem’s shoulder, squeezing it. “You seem to be doing better. You gave us a real scare.” He’s trying to inject a little levity, but it seems to be rejected. The boy grimaces in his direction, and says nothing. Thomas looks up. Albert is leaning on the counter, looking tensely at the two of them. His expression is hidden, his fingers curled and pressed to his lips, his other arm crossed over his chest.

“I’m not… I’m… not…” the boy struggles out. He clenches his fists, wincing against the pain he’s causing himself.

Thomas waits a moment, expecting more, giving the boy time to finish his thought, but nothing comes. “I suppose, uh…” He trails off. He’s still rattled, himself. He never could have predicted any of this. The worst, of course, is yet to come. “I suppose, at the very least, we’ve learned a lesson.” The golem looks his way again, his face still an unreadable grimace, a mesh of pain and frustration. “One you won’t forget, I’d think. You can’t go touching that hot kettle, the next time you’re making tea.”

“I don’t think… there’s gonna be a next time.”

“What?” Tom leans down, trying to get a better look at the boy’s face. “... What did you mean by that?”

The golem glares up at the kettle on the table. He side-eyes Thomas, and then shrinks away, raising his shoulder, tightening the coil of his body as if to defend himself from a response. “I’m not touching that thing again,” he answers, looking away. “You… You make it yourself. I’m not gonna do it.”

Tom looks on wonder. Though a chill passes over his skin, his knowing apprehension, his understanding of what just happened, is tempered with another feeling. An irresponsible one, fascinated and giddy. Fascinated as much with the boy as with the golem. And then he looks up again, to Albert, who also understands, and Albert has taken his hand away from his face, which is the very portrait of cold fear. Something has happened that should not happen, should not be  _ possible, _ and when Albert’s eyes move from the golem to Thomas, there is a clear message behind them.

_ What have you done? _

And Thomas chooses to ignore that fear, and that question, and all his obligations to answer rightly. Instead, he obeys that irresponsible feeling, and he says something he shouldn’t, and that both he and Albert will come to regret.

“All right. That’s all right. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, Blues.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, this one took a little while to come out, but it's an important one, so I wasn't just going to sling it out there half-rendered.  
> Not much to say otherwise. It's a big one full of a lot of things that needed to be established, so I'm glad it's out there. Next time on Scorching Sand, it's time for a rumble in the tower!


	6. Side Effects

Thomas stared into Rock’s eyes for a long time, alternating between the two. He tried looking in with a flashlight, which stung the boy’s retinas somewhat. It wasn’t particularly focused, and lit half of Rock’s face up when he did it. Thomas wasn’t an optometrist; he didn’t have any specialized tools for it, just whatever tools he’d collected over the years, used to the best of his ability. He shut off the lights in the room, then leaned back down and looked again.

“I don’t know what to say, Rock.”

“Is it… bad?”

Thomas stood up straight, and passed the flashlight to Rock, who clutched it like a security blanket in the dark room. “I don’t know. I don’t even really know what I’m looking for, to be honest. This isn’t my field. I don’t see anything obviously wrong in there, but you’re telling me your eyes don’t work, and your body can only heal so much. Cracks and strains, physical things…” He rubbed his forehead with both hands.

“Are you… Are you gonna have to… take them out…?” Rock asked quietly, hesitating to say it.

“No,” Thomas answered. “Well, one of these days, maybe. To fix them properly. But we don’t have time for that. I’d have to put you to sleep, open you up… I could try without all that, but I might not be able to hook them back up again.” And in the back of his mind, there was another reason he didn’t care for the idea. He hadn’t opened Rock’s head since the boy had first awoken. He’d gotten used to the sight of him whole, and the alternative would have made him very uneasy, as impractical as those feelings might have been.

Rock let out a little bit of breath that had been resting in his throat. “But… I still can’t see right…”

“Well, that’s not exactly true. You can see well enough to get around and fight, can’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And you said it’s gotten better some on its own.”

Rock nodded, his head sinking a little lower. “Right.”

“... What’s wrong? You _want_ me to open you up?”

“No! No, doctor.” He didn’t care for that idea at all. He had just been hoping that the doctor would show him a little more care, a little more sympathy, as impractical as those feelings might have been.

“All right. We don’t have a better way, then. You’re going back out there with your vision as it is. Maybe it’ll go on getting better. I’ll see what I can do about patching you up otherwise.” He came back, and placed a hand on Rock’s shoulder, leaning back and forth to look him over. “Seems to me you’re in pretty good shape, though. I suppose you’ve been ending fights quickly. Which is good,” he went on, going to the wall to turn the lights on again. “I know you’re not much for bloodshed, Rock. Maybe you’d rather talk, but you know you can’t talk these men out of this. Don’t you?”

Rock turned off the flashlight, and gazed into the mirrored interior, the blues and greys of his form twisted all around. Blue, grey, and yellow. “Doctor…”

Thomas sighed. “I know you don’t need to be told again. Don’t tell me you don’t understand. That hesitation, that’s going to get you killed. We don’t want that. You’ve got to be ready to kill, Rock.” The flashlight slipped from the boy’s grip and hit the floor. Thomas grunted and stooped for it, leaving Rock in his seat while he went to put it away across the room.

“Doctor. There’s someone else out there.”

“Someone else,” Thomas responded proddingly, placing the flashlight in a toolbox, and a few other things that were out while he was at it.

“Someone like… me. A lot like me. He’s trying to help.” Rock heard the noise from Thomas stop, and when he looked, the doctor’s hands were still, one hanging off the toolbox by its last two fingers. “He’s got a gun, like this one. He’s got on red clothes, and…” Rock looked at his chest, and grabbed hold of his scarf, pulling it down some to see it better. The man in red had asked for it. He looked at Thomas again, and the doctor had turned halfway around. He was looking at it too.

<<<

“Hot out there today,” Albert says, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. “Better than the cold, at our age, but… Boy,” he finished simply, shaking his head and returning to his work. He’s familiarized himself with a great deal of what’s in the book. Thomas has asked him to take some notes and translate a few things into a more common science for reference. Certainly mathematics are universal but in the process of creating Blues there was a lot of trial and error, a lot of scratching on paper as Albert worked out units of measurement through elimination and guesswork. Whoever wrote that manual did so before anyone had ever spoken the word “volt”. Thomas finds that amusing; Albert still marvels at the prospect of what else was done before the men in his time had words to describe it. “Tom, can we close that door? Just a while? Maybe run a fan, if the generator can spare the juice...”

Thomas is seated on the other side of the room, reviewing something else. He’s been testing Blues, checking his physical parameters. They need to know what he’s capable of, and then they need to know again after every tweak and pull. They’re capable of making another, but they won’t yet. Not until they know what to expect. And now they’re sure that they really don’t.

He doesn’t want to get up; his knees have been giving him trouble, the right one especially. He’s been overweight for the last forty years and that’s not the kind of thing that causes fewer problems as time goes by. So he puts his notebook down in his lap, and searches for Blues. He catches sight of him in the kitchen. It’s not much of one, just a room with a sink that they decided to put some small appliances in. Coffee pot, toaster oven, a small refrigerator, a table the two of them could share and talk over meals. The room is partially blocked off by a wall but half of it is exposed, and Thomas can see Blues slouched forward at the table by himself. His back and hips are visible; his head is hung down, hidden behind the wall. 

It feels to him as though Blues has been placing himself farther away lately, when not being called upon. Hiding himself, as much as he can in the cramped building. Blues never goes down to the basement workshop unless he’s commanded to, and they almost never let him step outside - only twice, because he wouldn’t stop asking, they let him stray a few feet out the door, well-supervised. So he winds up sharing the upstairs with the two of them. Only, less so lately.

“Blues,” Thomas calls to him, and the golem jerks up in his seat. He leans back to meet Thomas’ eyes. His arms are crossed tightly around his chest.

“What?”

Blues no longer answers “yes” or “what is it, doctor”, or anything polite. It’s “what”, or it’s nothing. Tom tries not to dwell on it, and he never brings the point up with the boy. Albert has grumbled about it, but he’s kept to books and machines in recent days, leaving Thomas to tend to the golem mostly on his own.

“Could you shut the door, please?” Thomas asks, tilting his head toward it.

Blues looks behind himself, through the kitchen entryway to the front door, seeming oddly hesitant. He fixes Thomas with a cautious look. Albert, in the long silence between command and obedience, looks up from his work to watch what transpires. Finally, he asks, “Do I have to?”

Albert frowns. “You ought to.” Blues frowns right back, planting his hand on the back of his chair as if to heft himself to his feet, but not moving.

“I’d very much appreciate it,” Thomas says, and offers a smile. Slowly, haltingly, Blues gets to his feet and shuffles his way to the door, sunlight spilling over him. He swings it closed, pausing as the room becomes dimmer and waiting a moment before pushing it all the way into its latch. Blues turns away from the door, and crosses his arms again. Out of the sun once more, the red leather of his vest and the skin under his flannel cools back down. His body uses most of what energy it produces, leaving very little to run off of him as would a man’s natural warmth. Thomas has no way of knowing if that is normal for these things, as the book says nothing, and Blues is the first. But he knows now that heat plays a greater part in what they are than he first thought, and he takes note of the way Blues cradles himself as he leaves the door. “Blues. Are you cold?”

The boy whips his gaze back at Tom when he hears his name again. Tom watches him go from withdrawn at first to allowing himself to be vulnerable as he understands what’s being asked. Blues nods. “Almost always,” he says, just loud enough to be heard across the room.

Thomas puts the notebook aside, and scans the room for something. When he finds it, he arranges his hands on the back of the well-worn sofa and on his good knee, and heaves. It’s painful, and he knows he should wait until his right settles down before standing up, but something compels him to do this himself. “Oof...” He grunts and chuckles and winces, and heads for something standing near the door. “Here.” From a rack near the front door dangle various paraphernalia of dress, and Thomas retrieves a yellow scarf from a peg in the middle. He shows it to Blues, looking pleased with his own idea, and then very deliberately wraps it around the boy’s neck and shoulders, letting him see how it’s done. “We’ll see about getting you a good coat one of these days. This should do for now, I think. It’ll help, anyway.”

He pats the golem on the back, then turns toward Albert, to show him. Albert is already looking, observing their interaction with that look of suspicion and worry that has become so common, almost predictable in the last few weeks. But then Al pops his brow up and shakes his head, and returns to his work. None of my business, the gesture seems to say.

Thomas looks between his friend and the boy, who is now calmly running his hand over the cloth, squeezing its layers against his neck. Momentarily, Tom tries to contemplate his place in all this. Then he goes to the kitchen to put on the kettle for tea.

>>>

Rock’s maintenance was indeed a series of easy fixes this time around. There was not much to be done about minor burns, and he hadn’t strained himself badly. Going blind was the worst thing he’d done all day, to be sure, but that seemed to have mostly solved itself. Some way or another. The story the doctor had told Rock while his hands were at work had been hard to follow. It had started and stopped and wavered and changed direction a lot as the doctor had struggled through it. But the name Blues had been a part of it, and Rock had been repeating it to himself in his head for some time now, as if that alone meant a great deal.

“It’s getting late. I don’t think you should go out again. Leave it for the night,” Thomas told him. He was already putting on his evening tea. “I think I’ll fix the workshop’s back door tomorrow, while you’re out.” The way he said it, it was as if Rock was going to be out running an errand, and there was an unusual lack of urgency about the mission.

“I don’t need to sleep,” Rock reminded him. That was true, and Thomas was well aware - he’d awoken to the downturned gaze of one of them on multiple occasions, much to the dismay of his poor old heart. But he said nothing in response, so Rock pushed harder. “Doctor. He’s still out there.”

“So you’ve told me.”

“No, he’s out _there,_ ” Rock insisted, pointing outside. “He’s in the clock tower. He’s still fighting. He might be fighting right now; what if he needs my help?”

“Well, if he’s survived this long, the boy’s no fool,” Thomas said, perhaps a little proudly. “No need to worry. No need to…” A few seconds of thought later, he deflated, and said nothing else. Rock paused, then took a few steps toward the door. The doctor moved quickly, clearing the room faster than Rock had seen before, and grabbed the boy’s hand.

Thomas heaved out a dry breath as his body came to a stop, his expression stone serious, his hand shaking around Rock’s. Tom’s hand was cold - he got cold fast after sunset - and he could feel the warmth of Rock’s hand sinking into his. Not as warm as a human being, but warm enough to know that he was there.

Rock’s hand was already on his gun. As Tom’s eyes fell on it, he took that hand away, trying to hide its intent. He placed it on the scarf instead. “Can I… Can I go outside, for a little while?” Rock asked. He twisted the cloth in his fingers as if to, by analog, untwist the feeling in his chest just beneath it. He was afraid, and not for himself. For Blues. He was afraid for another, like he’d been when Albert had threatened Thomas before he’d left. And Blues was afraid for him. Not so afraid as to show it, but afraid enough to help. That kind of fear was different than what Rock faced in battle. It felt like a chain, not a weight. Warm, not cold. He would chase that fear down its tunnel with the same audacity with which he fled up out of the other’s. He would, if he was allowed. Thomas gave no answer. Rock folded on his pathetic deception. “Please. I need to find him. Please say I can go. I can make sure he’s safe.”

Tom’s hand was still shaking. His eyes were fixed on the scarf for a moment, then they drifted, out the door and then into the space beside it, his gaze becoming aimless. He let go of Rock’s hand, and wandered back into the middle of the room, bumping into things with his legs but staying upright. He covered his eyes with one hand. “Nothing’s changed,” he lamented quietly.

“Doctor…?” Rock asked, stepping back from the door, unsure.

“Nothing _changed._ Boys… fighting for old men. Our stupid, selfish ends…” His voice creaked with sorrow, and slumped into the wall near the kitchen, now covering his face with both hands. His shoulders shook. “Boys fighting and dying out there… Nothing changed at all. Goddamn it, nothing’s changed. Nothing’s changed,” he repeats, swaying against the wall and falling against a shelf full of folders and texts. He sinks down into that nook, looking weak, sounding lost, and Rock again found himself feeling that fear for another, but this time had no idea how to act, and for some reason that scared him further. He took a step forward, into the home, and the doctor looked up quickly, startled into focus by the sound of movement.

There were tears in Thomas’ eyes. That twisting, driving fear grew denser. It coupled with something colder. How had the doctor put it before? That others relied on him, that was meant to make him strong. Like music, being needed made him greater. Rock was vaguely aware of his purpose in the world. To fight, so others didn’t need to die. The doctors had allowed him to understand some mission, a vision for him, along those lines. But feeling like the strongest thing in the room, it only made Rock feel like he couldn’t possibly be enough. Fearing for someone else; there was something worthy in that. But, fearing for the helpless; that seemed hopeless. Seeing the doctor as he was now, no new strength came to him.

“Rock,” Thomas said softly. He did not sob, or wail or moan, but only slouched there with his eyes wet and his voice weak. “Go. If you want to go, then go. I won’t tell you not to. But be careful. Please, boy. Don’t throw yourself away on anything.” He shook his head sadly. “And if you find him… If you find Blues, just tell him I’m sorry. Tell him… Tell him he can always come home.” He pleaded with red, bleary eyes, and said nothing else.

Rock found himself confused. Not by the command, which was simple. What confused him was how he felt, hearing that command. The way Thomas spoke, his wishes; they were frustrating to him. They felt unfair. As impractical as those feelings might have been.

“I will,” he said, because he couldn’t say anything else. He left, shutting the door behind him, and tightened the scarf up around his neck as the cool of dusk finally surrounded him.

<<<

Steadily, Blues paces toward the door. Thomas grabs him by the arm, but has no hope of stopping him. The boy was made too strong for that; steel rope and heavy bones jerk the golem’s limbs out of Tom’s hands as if they weren’t even there. Blues walks through the doctor’s desperate grasp like it’s a lasso made of thread.

Albert is following behind, only close enough to observe. He reacts to everything that happens as if it means nothing to him. As if this is just the course of things. As if Blues would be no great loss.

Blues throws the door open, and it hits the wall with a _crack,_ the knob striking the edge of the window frame and splintering it. Outside awaits him. The world. Everything. Freedom. Peace, maybe. He stops before the threshold, witnessing the world, plain yet inviting, and waits just long enough for Thomas to get behind him and grab him by his scarf. The doctor’s hand, weak though it may be compared to everything Blues is, manages to pull him back some before he twists and tears himself away. Blues looks down, grabs the scarf in one hand, and pulls it from his neck, violently snapping one end down against the floor.

“Blues, please. You don’t understand. What I wanted for you, it isn’t-”

“Don’t tell me. Don’t lie to me. I don’t care for more lies.” Blues comes closer, raises an accusing finger, and his presence pushes them both back. He isn’t a large man, even compared to his hunched and withered makers. He is still a boy. But he’s strong. They made him to tear apart an army, if it was needed. They both know what he’s capable of, how little they are compared to him. Thomas draws back because he’s afraid to act. Albert, because he’s afraid to die.

Thomas raises a trembling hand, trying to calm his creation. “Blues. Don’t go.”

“Why?”

“If the people out there discover you… They’re going to be afraid. They’ll try to destroy you, if they find out what you are.”

Albert leans out from behind Thomas to catch the golem’s attention, speaking frankly. “They will. And knowing people like I do, I’d wager they’ll try and _burn_ you.”

Blues seems to falter at that, but his expression hardens up again just as quickly. “You know they can’t stop me. You know I’m too strong. You’re lying. To scare me.” Thomas tries to cut in, but Blues steps forward threateningly, startling him silent before he manages more than a murmur. “You can’t control me with orders, so you wanna do it with _fear_. You wanna make me too scared to disobey you.”

“We need to understand you. There’s too much we don’t know. Once we understand, we can fix everything.” Thomas is rambling, rattled, saying things that barely make any kind of sense, because as long as they’re talking, Blues isn’t leaving. “My boy. Please, we can help. Whatever’s… Whatever you’re…” he struggles, trailing off, head spinning and lips quivering.

“Why did you make me?” Suddenly still, Blues poses the question.

Drawing out the moment of quiet, Thomas hesitates. “What?”

Blues waited patiently for an answer the first time. Now he comes forward, and grabs Thomas by his shoulders, squeezing them until the old man lets out a choked cry. “Why did you make me?” he demands. “What was I for? Say it. Why’d you test me? Why’d you make me strong, teach me to shoot? Why’d you give me orders?” He steps forward, digging his fingers in and dragging Thomas back on his heels. A groan, louder and more pained, escapes the doctor’s lips. “Say it!”

Thomas opens his eyes against the pain, his whimpering voice making its way into his breath, and looks Blues in the eyes. Though glassy, greyed, framed with seams, the light in them is still there. Potential. Life. Fury. Thomas shakes his head sorrowfully, apologetically, and says the only thing he can think. “I don’t know.”

Blues hurls him into Albert, and they both go down. “Liar. I do. I know. I found out. Because I’m not as dumb as you think.” He approached, towering over them now. Albert scrambled to get up. Thomas did not. “No matter how, you want control. You wanna control me,” Blues said, mashing his hand half-closed against his own chest. “And things like me. And control the world, with things like me. Make it into what you want. You want me to destroy so you can build, and you want it all under your control.” Thomas raises his hand, tries to deny it, deny _something_ , but he’s unable to muster it.

Though he looks as though he wants to say more, after a moment Blues turns his back on them, and heads for the door. “Where are you going?” Thomas asks.

“I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.”

“Stay here. Blues, just stay here with us. We can make everything right,” the doctor offers weakly.

Blues spins on his heels, raises his fist, and pitches the balled-up cloth he’s got clenched in it down at the floor, its tail fluttering down behind. “No, you can’t.” He doesn’t bother to shut the door. He turns, and walks away. Then he starts to jog. As they look on, Blues breaks into a sprint, and in seconds is gone.

>>>

“And that was always the problem, with Blues. We never knew what to expect. And when it came, whatever it was, we weren’t ever ready for it.” Albert paced around the table, talking on and on as if the figure lying on it could listen; it was asleep again, and could not. “It was Tom’s fault, naturally. He let things like that happen. He _liked_ being surprised. I’d wager it’s because he was always so miserable,” Albert sneered at the sleeping boy. “He hid it well, smiling like an idiot over simple pleasures, talkin’ hope and what-ifs, but I know a man on the edge when I see ‘im. I can tell when a man is cracking,” he insisted. He raised his hands, curling his fingers as if to strangle someone. “Dumb sonofabitch, not knowing how crazy he must’ve been, to smile at times like that. In the face of… you!” He pointed at the corpse bolted down in front of him. “A boy like you. Who smiles at something like that? Who lets something like you run _loose?_ Hell!”

The room was dark, the machines and supplies surrounding him left obscured but for the light from the long, thin windows lined up below the ceiling of that largest space in the factory. Anything he didn’t need had been shut off, lights included. It had all been giving him a headache. Too much noise and light, and too little sleep. Under a single work lamp suspended by an elastic tether, his face and the boy’s body were illuminated in an ill yellow light.

Albert leaned over the table, running his eyes over the body, the face, the seams and unnatural shapes poking at the skin around his joints. Beneath the doctor lay a boy; they’d had great luck with boys, whose bodies took to the process and the System more readily than those of their elders. And thankfully - if one dared to use that word for it - the war had left many boys to pick from the fields. Preserved by sun, sand and wind, and radiation.

His voice fell down into a rasp. “But not this time. Not ever again, you hear me?” He raised a hand over the boy’s chest, pausing without a clue what he’d meant to do with it. Then he curled it into a fist and let it fall with a solid _thud,_ like the merest attempt at resuscitation. “Because unlike Blues, you’re no accident. You’re not perfect. But you’re no accident. Unlike him and the other little accidents, you’re going to be just what you were made to be. Unlike Tom, I’m not looking to be surprised. I don’t want any accidents. I want results. I want progress.”

The boy said nothing, still asleep. Until now, he’d been awake perhaps a few days in total, though he’d first been raised two weeks before. The dust of three dozen corpses was on Albert’s hands when this one had sat up. The first real breakthrough, he’d come to find. Tall with thick black hair and ashy skin, and deep gouges in his face, the boy lay serene now. But there had been no surprises, the last time he’d awoken. And so the next time, Albert wouldn’t put him down again. The doctor had made too many cuts and fixes, and the results no longer changed. The boy wasn’t perfect, but he was done now, and he was a start. The next, perhaps, Albert could push even further toward that foggy zenith he saw in his mind.

“Unlike Tom,” Albert whispered, his voice soft and high, “I’m not afraid to read deeper. I’m not confused, I’m not afraid, thinking of what you could be. Least not anymore. From now on, no more accidents. You’re going to be better. From now on, you’re all going to be better than Thomas would have made you. I’ll build what he refused to build, and not by accident. The future those accidents have been scratching at.” He circled around to the head of the table. A set of thick cords supported an electric battery, and from that ran smaller wires that traveled down to the floor and then back up to sink into the boy’s wrists and ankles, his chest, his neck, and up into the roof of his mouth.  
  
“And the future starts with you, my boy.” Albert wrapped his fingers around a lever attached to the battery, and smoothly swung it over until it stopped and contact was made. The battery hummed and the wires traveling into the body twitched as their contacts jerked about under the flesh. The boy curled and uncurled weakly. He groaned, and moaned. Then he screamed, and kept screaming. His body strained against the belts holding him down. Albert knew they felt little pain at all, when fire wasn’t involved. He wondered what they screamed for, then. He wondered what they all might have been screaming _at._ But no matter how awful the sound, it was no longer enough to make him shrink away. He’d spent too long listening to it. Now he just waited, and wondered. Maybe one day, one of them would be able to tell him what it was for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Note: Hm. I said there was a fight this chapter, didn't I? Whoops. Can't keep track. Nope, this one is nice and peaceful. Niiice and peaceful.  
> It was also written while I was in the middle of receiving/recovering from minor eye surgery and having trouble seeing, myself. So, I feel you Rock.  
> See you all in chapter 7 for some violence, for real this time.


	7. Bodies

Sunset. Something within Rock always managed to appreciate it, a time of beauty in the deathly vast of the desert, when the sky bled red into the earth and the sand gave up gold in tribute.

He’d been given his last sunset many nights ago, nights that for a time he’d spent in blissful, uncompromised rest. The sun no longer rose or set for him, but for the living. The beauty of it was an experience he secretly souvenired every evening through a window, a vision of warmth to hold onto, while he spent in waking the night which they spent in sleep. The sun was theirs, in all its ways. The night was his. The night, lonesome and useless though it was, brought him freedom. Freedom from his responsibilities, his woes, his orders. Freedom from the natural, who slept around him while he sat alone and still by the window. He’d sit bathed in orange that faded to blue, occasionally hearing the movement of bodies - and sometimes hesitantly turning his head toward the noise, and catching the chilling light of their eyes as they watched him savour light from the workshop’s darkest shadows.

Most nights, but not this one. This night he would spend in fear, in battle, and in pain. But he had already prepared, in his mind, to give this night away. Not for his orders; for Blues. The clock tower was some distance away, a long enough walk that he’d have time to contemplate what awaited him. And to look over the scars left by the fires of his battle with The Heat. But he chose to think of better things, for he’d come to know in recent days that there were better things. 

Blues was one. Someone who cared and feared for him. Someone who saw him not as a tool or a hero or a monster or a competitor. An equal, or close to that. A fellow. A brother.

Music was another. The sense of rhythm he’d developed, the sense for how his footfalls landed in a certain time, the ear he’d developed for melody. The knowledge of his namesake.

The people, whom he’d met face-to-face just recently for the first time. Under dire circumstances, just after their liberation, he’d been within a few feet of them. Spoken to them, as if he were a person. And they hadn’t hated him. Though he’d have rather been a fellow than a hero, still the thought that these buildings that basked in the light of sundown - the lives hiding fearfully within - were under his protection and guarded by his determination and strength, held a certain warmth. It made him think, perhaps, lonely nights and purloined sunsets would not be the only parts of their world he would ever claim for himself.

Rock’s thoughts passed back and forth over all of these comforting things, his mind wandering while his feet carried him straight. And then a gun went off behind him, and that little serenity he held onto flew out of his hands.

The shot passed nowhere near him, or not near enough for any of his senses to catch it. But it startled him, and he was slow to turn and draw. In the blur, he was aware of a small shape about twenty feet away from one of the stripped and scarred homes. He pulled his weapon from its holster, his aim gyrating around that shape for a second, and at the same time he sensed footsteps from somewhere else, in the same general direction.

His eyes took their time focusing - a fraction of a second, but longer than they should have, dangerously long. He hadn’t had time to fire a shot by the time he realized what he was looking at.

“NO!!” he heard someone shriek; a woman’s voice. Her body entered Rock’s conscious vision at just about the same moment she tackled to the ground the young child who had been pointing the rifle at Rock’s back.

It all developed so suddenly in front of him; it took him time to process the scene. The rifle was under them both now, and it was as long as the boy was tall; no wonder the child hadn’t come close to hitting him, though Rock was thankful all the same. The woman was curled around him. She slowly, carefully, raised her head to look up at Rock. Visible fright shone in her eyes, and she lowered her head again and held tighter to the boy. It was only then Rock realized he was still pointing his gun at them.

He holstered it, and raised his empty palms to them. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s all right,” he repeated, not knowing what else to say. Like a great many things, this had never happened to him before. He didn’t know how to fix it.

She looked up again, and then began the clumsy, gradual process of getting to her feet while hauling the boy up and behind her. She locked eyes with Rock, unflinching. The boy tried to peer out from behind her. Both of them were afraid, and both of them staring cold daggers into him. “Get away,” she told Rock. “You get the hell away!” Though her tone was firm, even furious, her head tilted back and away, wanting to escape even as her feet held to the ground. Rock recognized her face. She was the woman from the factory. The one who had spoken to him near the tracks.

But she was different now. She was dirtier. Her clothes were torn around the arms. Her eyes were red, one in particular. And on the side of that eye, scars and blackness. Burns and soot. There was blood, streaks and scrapes around her forearms that hadn’t been there before, hadn’t come from the factory. She had been fighting. Against things and forces she had no hope of conquering. She had fought when he couldn’t be there to do the fighting. A bubble of pride for her grew in his chest, and he started to smile. She did not smile back.

“It’s okay. It’s me,” he assured the woman naively, as if that would mean anything to her.

“You get  _ away _ from us!” she screamed at him. Rock’s face fell, and he nearly fell himself. It seemed he’d been wrong about how the people felt.

“I wasn’t going to shoot-” he started to explain, but the boy seemed to take the woman’s sudden fury as a signal. He darted forward for the rifle again, and the woman had to heave him back to relative safety. His small fingers barely nudged it out of the dirt, but Rock leapt backward. His hand went to his pistol for a split second. He tore it away, hoping she hadn’t seen. 

There was a moment of quiet. Two sets of panicked, human breathing. One still shadow over them who made no sound. The woman held his gaze unflinchingly, but she was afraid. Rock lowered himself a little, raised his palms again. She inched forward, lowered, and her hand crept out a little. Rock realized she was carefully trying to get closer to the gun. “Please, don’t shoot me,” he told her, and she froze. “I won’t hurt you. I just… have to get up there,” he said, pointing behind him roughly at the tower.

She stayed still for a few seconds. Then she moved her hand again, this time toward the gun’s barrel, pausing twice to check his gaze for any sign of malice. She took up the weapon by the business end, making no attempt to put her hand near the trigger. They at least had an understanding now, or so it seemed. “If you’re leavin’... then go ahead and leave.”

“It’s me,” he said again. “You remember?”

“I know what you are. You think I don’t see them scars all over you? You think I can’t see that… that  _ witchlight _ in them evil eyes?” she spat, and Rock knew it was over. She wasn’t a friend, and she wouldn’t be. Not ever. In that moment, he could feel a part of him break. It was like a rope snapping, and his body hunched over just a little without it.

Rock lost focus, staring into nothing as he began to turn away. “I’ll… go, then.”

“Go. Get out. Take all yer kind with you. You take all this fire and death with you and all you sons of bitches get  _ out _ ,” she said with a trembling anger. She was beginning to cry. For all her strength, she was lost and afraid, just as he was, and without the power to end it. “You leave us all; better yet, you go join the bodies… Maybe heaven’ll forgive you for ever bein’. And your makers for makin’ you.”

That stirred something inside him. He couldn’t name what it was. His feelings toward the doctors had always been complicated, and now, with all that had happened and all Rock had seen and heard, they felt impossible to navigate. There was a part of him that wanted to tell her that it wasn’t Thomas’ fault, wanted to make sure that she wouldn’t go to him with her blame and anger. There was also a small part of him that didn’t care.

A sharp sound cut through the air, and they all turned to see what had made it. The sound struck a fearsome chord with Rock, who had heard such a sound in the heat of the burning shed. It was the sound of a thick wooden beam being split, this time by a heavy impact. By the time Rock looked, there was a body already in motion, about halfway to the ground. A form that he knew was Blues plummeted from the rickety, haphazard balcony sticking out from the tower, and struck the earth at the bottom of an eighty-foot fall.

<<<

“We’re really doing this again,” Thomas muses sadly. He’s looking away from everything, unable to face either his work or his partner. His thoughts are with the one who left them just days ago. He’s not ready, nor is he sure he ever wants to be.

Without looking up from what he’s doing, Albert responds rather grimly, “This whole damn operation was your idea.” His voice is a growl, and he glances away from the body to look at Thomas. Then, as if putting on a new face, his expression brightens some, and he waggles his brow at his friend. “Besides, Tom. Why stop after just one failure? What sorta philosophy is that, hm?” He smiles broadly, his mouth stretching to its limit, with no light in his eyes. Thomas does not find that smile reassuring, but he wanders back to the general area of their work all the same.

The body bolted to the table is tall, with red hair and sharp features. “This one’s a lot older. Died a lot older, I mean.”

“Well, maybe this one won’t have quite as rebellious a spirit. Reckon he might have lived just long enough to have that stamped out. What do you think?” Al asks lightly, but Thomas sinks at the thought. Albert turns on him, fixing him with a stare. “Look, Tom. There are but two parties in the world. The quick and the dead, so they say. Now, I know which side I like being on. I’d like to think you’d agree.” He jerks his head at the young man’s body. “How ‘bout him?” He drops down and leans with his elbow on the table, closer than ever to the corpse. “Let’s wake him up and ask him, what do you say?”

Thomas hesitates to answer, staggered by the strange, mirthless levity in Albert’s behaviour. “I’d say… your feelings on the subject have taken a sharp turnaround, Al,” he responds warily.

Flashing a careless smirk, Albert turns away to circle the table. “A change in philosophy is unavoidable in a changing world.” He whips around again, shrugging rather theatrically. “No one ever got anywhere pretending things are like they’re not. That’s not progress. It’s not how you change the world. Is it, Tom?”

After a loaded moment of quiet, Tom’s chest swells with a deep breath. Then, without a word, almost without thought, his hands go back to their work.

>>>

Rock put the tense and disheartening conversation behind him, turning his back on the woman and boy without another thought. It was lucky that they turned and ran as well the moment his attention left them, without firing another shot. He had one thing on his mind now. One person.

He’d walked most of the way already, and to sprint the last stretch took less than half a minute. He laid eyes on the crumpled heap long before then, and feared the worst. But a moment before he arrived, apparently having been playing dead until his backup arrived, Blues sat up, and Rock felt that chain of fear slacken just a little, as relief came and they were together.

Blues was in bad shape, that much was very clear. His upper arm above where that slapdash excuse for a shield was bolted had been filled with thin iron spikes. Nails, Rock realized after a second look, which Blues was in the process of pulling out with apparent effort and focus. “Blues,” he called when he was close enough to speak without shouting. The man in red looked up, shocked at the sound of the name, confirming what Rock already knew. Then he shook it off and went back to pulling nails. “What happened to you?” Rock asked, coming close.

“Tower’s master. He shot me.” Blues grabbed another nail, and moved it a little. He hesitated, and let it go, electing to leave that one in.

“With… nails?” Rock squinted, perplexed.

Blues shrugged. “S’pose he just wanted to make me look a little more like him.” He looked up again, paused, and smirked. “You’ll see what I mean,” he muttered, and yanked another out, grimacing with dissatisfaction at how something inside his arm reacted to the motion.

“I don’t know why they don’t all have guns, like ours,” Rock said as he peered quizzically at the nails slowly piling up on the ground.

Blues surprised him by laughing a little under his breath, a sound Rock hadn’t heard from him before. He searched the ground for a moment, picking up the gun that had fallen and landed with him, maybe just now remembering it. “Albert wasn’t expecting either of us to come and put up a fight. He put a couple of these together, but I guess they’re not easy to make. I snatched one, but there sure ain’t enough to go around.” Rock’s hand drifted to the grip of his own pistol. His was a simple, inelegant thing with its parts left sticking out, and the one they’d all practiced with. Flash’s gun, and even the one Blues held, were more sophisticated even at a glance; newer models.

Rock took an eager step forward as something crossed his mind. “You took it from Albert? From where he’s hiding? Blues, if you know where he is, we can-” He was cut off by a hand being raised, nearly shoved in his face, to stop him.

“He didn’t set up shop there for long. He went off looking for something bigger. He’s got big plans, Rock,” Blues told him heavily, fixing him with a glare. “Big plans. He needed someplace that would fit ‘em. But he’s sending messages to this tower here. I figure we can get an idea where they’re coming from if we get up there.” He started to pull another nail out, and halted as he felt something. He opted to leave that one in. “So, that being the situation, that ugly fella up there needs to die.”

“You should go back to the workshop first. The doctor can fix you.”

“Aw, hell, I landed on my back. I’ll be fine,” Blues replied, as if it was the most sensible thing he could have said. “Lucky for me,” he added with a smile, picking up a fistful of nails, “that sonofagun left me what I need to stick myself back together.” He chuckled at his own joke, and got to a knee. He managed to take half a step before he collapsed forward, his face and shoulder hitting the dirt.

“Blues!” Rock leaned down to steady him, helping him back to his knee. Blues didn’t look at him; he was staring blankly, a fearful, lost look on his face. It was a startling change of character. Blues’ hand went down to his abdomen, patting and pressing on his body down to his hip, up to his chest, looking like he was searching for the problem. But his hand came back empty and he planted it in the dust, pushing himself shakily to his feet. “You have to go home,” Rock repeated.

“No I don’t. No, I don’t have to go back there,” Blues growled, that lost look filling in with anger.

“Listen...”

“I hurt him!” he said, pointing a finger skyward, to the tower’s heights. “I wounded him, before he managed to knock me off. We gotta bring him down while he’s still hurt. It’ll be easier that way.” Rock clammed up at that. It wasn’t the best reason to forego repairs in his state, but it was a reason, and he couldn’t figure out how to argue. “You get up there. Take the fight to him while he’s bleeding. Kill him, if you can. I’ll follow you. I’ll be right behind you, Rock.”

Blues managed to steady himself as he said it. He looked ready. He wasn’t, and he’d be slow to join the fight again, they both knew. But Rock found it in his heart to trust him when Blues said he’d be right behind. Just like he’d been against The Heat.

Though he was afraid, Rock turned and headed for the steps without another word. He had all he needed.

<<<

Thomas enters the kitchen with two handfuls of dirty mugs hanging by their handles from his fingers, gathered from the lower workshop. Albert never washes anything, but Thomas has long since made the job his own. Doing dishes and mopping up spills - in the kitchen and workshop alike - is easier than maintaining equipment, which Albert usually insists on doing himself, to be sure it’s done correctly.

He’s surprised to see Albert at the table reading the book. So engrossed in it, in fact, that he has to physically lift his head up and out of it to be able to meet Thomas’ eyes as he enters.

“Now that’s a sight,” Tom remarks before turning to put down the dirty drinkware by the other dishes. “What happened to, ‘this table’s for talking?’” They’ve frequently talked shop at the kitchen table - and with so much happening, they have to these days - but Albert has always been against physically bringing their work to it. He called Thomas uncouth for it on several occasions before Tom learned to give up and just keep work in the workshop.

Albert himself seems momentarily surprised by his own behaviour, his lips falling open and eyes drifting around. But he digs back into the book, doubling down. “Suppose it’s just that good a read.”

Thomas starts to fill the sink, leaving the tap half-closed to keep the noise down while they’re talking. “Well… Any thoughts?” Albert surprises him with a sharp, almost accusatory look in response, and there’s an unexpected moment of tension for Thomas to break through. “You’re more a builder than I am. Catch anything else I didn’t?”   
  
“Mm. Good question. I’ll let you know,” Albert says, and punctuates it by turning a page. His eyes move around, but it’s clear he isn’t reading anymore - just thinking. Their conversations have been taking on a strange air of uncertainty as of late. As first Thomas worried that Albert was just cracking under stress. Even after his friend seemed to pull himself together, those uneasy moments remained. 

He turns the faucet up. The water in it is fine for both washing and drinking, but it shuts off sometimes unexpectedly as the aging treatment plant with its equipment half-functioning struggles to keep up with the town’s demands. Albert has offered to look into repairing a few things, provided he’s given both pay and materials, a bargain which was never resolved on the other end. Thomas is in the habit of running the sink (and the shower, for that matter) for as little time as possible, just in case a few minutes are all he’s going to get that afternoon before their pipes dry up. “ _ Tom, _ ” Albert says, raising his voice over the water’s rush.

Thomas startles and looks over his shoulder. “What?”

“How about you, Tom?”

“How about I… what?” he asks, drying off the mug he plans to use, his hands continuing to twist nervously long after the thing is dry. Albert has him fixed with a foggy stare. He reaches up and methodically massages his bare scalp with his fingers, letting his eyes wander off Tom’s jittery form by the counter.

“Caught anything I haven’t?”

>>>

Rock’s footfalls were heavy. Stealth was not something he was capable of, especially not in a place so quiet as this. In the eerie, patchy, orange light of the makeshift stairwell, the one sound accompanying his footsteps was the creaking of the precarious structure itself, which only made his approach more obvious. The stairway held many corners for him to round, and each one brought the fear that he’d turn it and be filled with metal by the tower’s master, who must have known exactly how close he was by the sound he made. 

No attack came. Rock turned one last corner, and came upon something new: a closed door. He was at the top. 

The solid construction of the clock tower on his left, the ramshackle beams and boards behind, and now in front of him was a wooden door, with hinges and no knob, just a bent-over piece of metal for a handle. Its construction was so shoddy it let light pour out from both the top and bottom. Rock kept his eyes on the space near the floor, expecting to see shadows, hear movement, but nothing came. His enemy was inside, there was nowhere else in the tower to go, but he was not making himself known.

Rock held still, and listened. The golem lurking within likely knew exactly where Rock stood, but was able to keep his own position hidden. A nail gun wouldn’t be able to penetrate the door, so it would have to open before Rock could be attacked. But he might not react in time when it did. Rock’s weapon was far more deadly than a nailgun. If he rushed in blindly, then even if the enemy got the first shot off, Rock would have plenty of time to land the killing blow. He was in little danger. That thought heartened him, and for a moment he was no longer fearful. His enemy was barely armed, and he was a minute or two from the workshop. He wouldn’t die here.

He waited another few seconds. A soft, distant sound made his nerves jump. It was coming from down below. Blues, he realized. His friend, his brother, was ascending. The footsteps from below got a little quicker, and Rock decided now was the time. The enemy was most likely right beside the door, where Rock would have to turn fully around after breaching to hit him. He decided on a plan of action, raised his arm, and charged through the door. It occurred to him the instant before that Blues had held a gun against this enemy too, and lost.

The door cracked against the back wall with the force Rock had put into it. He leapt inside and whirled around, scanning the room as he did. He spun right, and found the enemy was indeed waiting by the door. Had Rock scanned the left side of the room first instead of the right, he’d have probably gotten the first shot off. But a quarter of a second’s difference was all it took for the tables to turn. A mechanical  _ tchack!  _ immediately preceded the heavy thumping impact he felt in his arm, and then did so four more times.

The enemy really was an ugly one, Blues hadn’t been lying about that. Of all Albert’s men, this was the first who looked wrong, half-dead and incomplete, even on the surface. His jaw was covered by wire and plating, and the neck coming down from it was ragged and supported by pipe. His shoulders had plates on them as well, and the flesh had been attached to them haphazardly by screws that jutted up out of his form like vicious spikes. Everything that wasn’t covered by his coveralls, it was ugly and held together with screws and nails, staples and rivets. Rock could not fathom what was so important about this one that Albert had to make him stand, when he had no business standing.

Rock’s gun hand felt heavy. There were nails in his wrist and forearm, and his fingers were resisting his commands. Only a little, but enough to make him realize he was in more danger than he’d thought. He brought that arm forward and fired. The tower’s master darted to one side, but too late. His shoulder exploded in a hail of sparks, metal, and meat, sending his assorted hardware off in arcs, and his dark blood began to ooze out from it. The flow was unusually light and haphazard for such a wound, as if his veins were as scattered and scarce as his flesh.

He surprised Rock then by throwing himself forward. He swung the nailgun, a heavy self-contained tool with a battery weighing it down, and batted Rock’s gun arm aside, the force wrenching it across his chest. The golem was a beast, hitting Rock like a sledgehammer with a flick of his arm. Rock tried to bring his gun back to bear, but the nailgun came back the other way and connected with his face, and suddenly the world was spinning, his eyes rattling in his head as the impact went through him.

The enemy cast a broad shadow over him as he continued pressing the attack, and drove his good shoulder into Rock’s chest. In the dizzying rush, Rock was aware of the spiked plates hitting him, and the vicious points sinking into him. They scraped at the metal bands reinforcing his ribcage, and pierced his muscle. The enemy wasn’t armed with a shoddy weapon, Rock thought as he went down. The tower’s master, this beastly golem, he  _ was _ the weapon. He’d never been hit so hard. When he hit the floor, it was like the world bounced up and away from him, and he almost went dark.

The next thing he felt was a crushing weight on his hand, grinding his curled fingers into the grip of his gun. The master’s boot. Then,  _ tchack! tchack! _ , one after another, the sounds of nails being fired. His arm was filled with them, his wrist squirming to pry his fingers loose until it was secured to the wooden floor and couldn’t be moved. When the pressure was released from his hand, Rock still couldn’t pick up his arm. It was pinned by more than a dozen nails, gun still in hand but pointed away from the fight. He strained, but barely felt them move. He needed leverage. He rolled over, reaching with his free hand to pry his gun arm loose, but halted when his enemy pointed the nailgun at his head.

Casually loading another plastic cartridge full of nails into his tool, the enemy spoke with a wretched voice which all but confirmed that everything inside matched the state of his outside. “Hello. And... goodbye.” Rock raised his free hand to hover between his face and the enemy’s firing line, as if he would simply catch the next onslaught in his fingers. “Name’s Needles. Go figure. Right?” He broke up his words with slow, shallow breaths, and paused to briefly regard the damage Rock had done to him. “Good shot. Well played. See you, kid.” They stared, and Needles paused again. “... Wait.”

“Wh-what?” Rock said, happy to have even a second of reprieve. He was rattled and confused, and just now coming to terms with how badly things were going for him. How poorly he’d handled this. And, not to mention, how much blood was now pooling around his gun arm.

Needles lowered the nailgun slightly, and approached with a relaxed stride. “That’s cruel. Right? Here. Give me the gun,” he said, bending down and reaching for Rock’s weapon. “I’ll do you quick.”

Rock couldn’t let that happen. For all Needles had been capable of without a real weapon, if he got hold of the gun, then it really would be over. He reached over his chest again, to tear his arm loose, not caring how much of himself he might leave nailed to the floor. Needles drove his arm back without a thought. He couldn’t free himself. He needed to improvise. He had to do  _ something _ .

His gun was pointing into the corner, his wrist barely able to twist it a few degrees in any direction. There was a metal support beam there. Could he bring it down? He’d watched the shots from his gun rip through an inch or two of steel, but the beam looked thicker than that. It didn’t matter. He had to act. If nothing else, he had to empty the gun.

The first shot sank hot into the metal, warping it as the bullet buried itself an inch deep. The kick torqued his wrist back and made his bones grind against the nails. Needles jumped back as it went off, startled. Rock focused everything on his next shot. The beam wasn’t all that wide. Most of its mass at that height had been distorted by the shot. If he could land a second shot near his first, it might be enough to bring it down, he thought. He squinted, grimaced, blocked out the panic and disorientation and the feeling in his arm. He steadied his wrist, and fired.

The beam did not come down. The second bullet struck its mark nearly perfectly, but it never touched the beam. It hit the first bullet, and disappeared with a ringing ricochet. In the same moment, Needles reared back, roaring in confused agony, finally taking his shadow off of Rock. There was blood coming from his collar, a tear in his clothing revealing a ragged wound where the bullet had tumbled through his skin and bone and then glanced off whatever scraps of metal were underneath, vanishing once again to perhaps retire in some other corner of the room.

Needled doubled over, grunting and straining against the pain, his hand clumsily padding the hole by his neck. There was a sudden, rapid thumping from somewhere else. Footsteps. Blues. Now was the time to act, for both of them. Rock threw his free arm to one side. His saw began moving once more, and once more he put it to work to free himself. Cutting through wood was still not an ideal use of the tool, but the floor was thinner than the beams in the shed, and the blade was able to spin a little more freely this time without being grabbed by the wood.

Unsurprisingly, after only a few seconds of the saw making all its noise, Needles spotted him trying to escape, and Rock saw him raise the nailgun. He pulled his saw arm away from its work to guard his face, and felt three more nails sink into it. He wondered how many more of them he’d have to take into himself before the cartridge would empty, and he’d have a moment to continue cutting. Then he heard shouting, and stomping. He lowered his arm, and Blues was there. He tackled Needles through the door, catching him from behind, and the two of them began their own scuffle. Rock had his chance. 

He put the blade back to the wood, and pulled with all his might until the floor began to splinter. He shut off the saw, clasped his hands around his gun, and heaved. A section of floor came up with his arm, rimmed by yellow teeth of raw wood from the break. He wasted no time, reloading his empty weapon, his eyes flicking between the gun and the fight happening near him.

Blues was digging his fingers into Needles’ face, pulling skin up from steel. It was gruesome. He was driving his foot into his opponent’s leg as well, trying to bring him down, but his other arm, the one with the shield bolted to it, was hanging oddly limp. His hand was clutching Needles by his clothes, but the elbow flapped back and forth, and the shoulder fared no better. Something in him was broken. Maybe more than it appeared.

“Rock! Shoot him!” Blues bellowed, wrestling Needles halfway into submission. The two of them went on struggling, and even with the cartridge loaded and his gun primed, Rock hesitated to act, afraid to hit the wrong body. Blues shouted again, with a greater desperation. Then Needles swiveled in his grip, and threw him off. Before Rock could recenter his aim, the fight moved off to one side, and Needles threw Blues into the wall, who collided with a grunt. Then Needles turned again, grabbed Blues, and drove his shoulder, spikes and all, up into the boy’s throat and jaw.

Blues didn’t make a sound. The look on his face only made that long, awful moment more chilling. Crying out for him, Rock finally steadied his aim with both hands, and squeezed the trigger. Needles barely managed to look in his direction before the gun went off again. The side of his head burst readily open in a cloud of blood, staples, and the like. He released Blues from his grip. Both bodies fell to the floor in front of Rock. Both of them kept moving, just barely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Note: Is it over...? Shoutout to jixie for proofreading and helping me get the phrasing just right. A lot of time and care went into making this chapter more than just another sad flashback and another gory deathmatch. I think we're finally getting somewhere. See you next chapter, where a new face joins the ranks.


End file.
